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Recordings

Schumann’s songs are among the greatest musical achievements of the nineteeth century, and this is the perfect release with which to mark the composer’s 200th birthday. This marvellous collection comprises Schumann’s complete songs, presented for ...» More

Why another Dichterliebe recording? Because Gerald Finley has simply one of the greatest voices of his generation, and is an artist at the peak of his powers. He brings to this noble cycle the supreme musical understanding that characterizes all his ...» More

'Hyperion’s Schumann series continues to strike gold with a collection … that finds baritone Christopher Maltman on superb form … with this ...'This is a treasurable issue – generous in quality and quantity alike. As with the Hyperion Schubert Song edition one struggles for new ways of expres ...» More

You my soul, you my heart,
You my rapture, O you my pain,
You my world in which I live,
My heaven you, to which I aspire,
O you my grave, into which
My grief forever I've consigned!
You are repose, you are peace,
You are bestowed on me from heaven.
Your love for me gives me my worth,
Your eyes transfigure me in mine,
You raise me lovingly above myself,
My guardian angel, my better self!

This is one of the most famous songs in the world, and with some justification. That Franz Liszt also made a celebrated solo piano transcription of it is testament to the memorable power of a melody that is unfailingly exhilarating. It is that rare thing, a piece that combines passion and tenderness, force and sweetness, a thrusting determination with an ability to yield. And all in a relatively short song in which, as a pianist, one has the impression of sometimes following the singer humbly, and sometimes leading him or her on, whipping up the vocal line to greater fervour. Thus, even in performance, the piece is about partnership where worshipping the beloved is far from an abject obeisance; the singer, like the person to whom one has given one’s love, requires real support. For the pianist this means the ability to listen, but it also gives him the right to expect that on occasion he will be trusted to take the lead.

The title, Schumann’s own, is a good one. It stands as a dedication piece for the whole cycle, and at the same time it is about dedication on a personal level. The poem, written in 1821, first appeared in the almanac Urania for 1823. This is not where Schumann found it, but we can be sure that in February 1827 Franz Schubert read it on page 302 of the fat little octavo volume; this was after he discovered the Wanderlieder by Wilhelm Müller (beginning on page 209) from which he would fashion the first part of his Winterreise. Schumann would probably have found the poem (without as title, and simply with the heading III) on page 212 of the Liebesfrühling section of Rückert’s Gesammelte Gedichte published by Heyder of Erlangen in 1834. It is curious to think that in the rich song-composing atmosphere of the times such words as these needed almost twenty years to find not only their definitive musical expression, but any setting at all. After Schumann had re-named the poem and composed his masterpiece, Widmung was set by Marschner and Litolff among many others, but these songs are pale shadows of their precursor.

The opening reminds us of another Schumann lied, Helft mir, ihr Schwestern, which describes the wedding day in Frauenliebe und -leben. The accompaniment opens with soaring arpeggios in dotted rhythms which have the boldness of ceremonial brass, but there should be nothing strident about this music. If Sydney Smith’s idea of heaven was eating pâté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets he would have found something heavenly about these fanfares, smooth as velvet. The trick is to make them heartfelt as well as proclamatory. ‘Innig’ the composer says first, and then ‘Lebhaft’. The melody which asserts itself above these surging figurations is of the kind that makes the pulses race on first acquaintance. Not only is the tune itself a real hit, but the word-setting encompasses miracles of appropriateness: a soulful drop of a fifth on ‘Seele’, an impulsive upward leap of a sixth on ‘Wonne’, a minor-key colouring on ‘Schmerz’, and a floatingly high tessitura on ‘darein ich schwebe’. All of this is seemingly effortlessly incorporated in a melody which unfolds with both Schwung and grace.

The second half of the poem (the seventh of the twelve lines) begins with words – ‘Du bist die Ruh’ – which are a Rückert trademark. Schubert had set them in 1822 as the opening of another lyric by the same poet from the collection Östliche Rosen. The immortal Du bist die Ruh was the result, a song which Schumann certainly knew. Schubert’s hidden presence in Widmung (it is twofold as we will see) could not have been an accident. The key signature switches from A flat major to E major. The restless quaver accompaniment is replaced by crotchet triplets and longer note values. The bass line is now warmly sonorous with tolling semibreves and minims. The result is that the song now seems suddenly slower and more expansive although the composer has marked no change of tempo or pulse. The slow-motion melody has a fervent, almost religious quality which can sound mawkish with the wrong singer. Your gaze, he says, has transfigured me, and we hear this for ourselves soon after the word ‘verklärt’: on ‘du hebst mich liebend’ a C sharp changes enharmonically to a D flat in the key change from E major back to A flat. It is as if someone who has been out in the cold has been welcomed indoors – on that apposite word ‘liebend’ – with an infinitely sweet embrace. Transfiguration in word and musical deed!

Rückert’s poem concludes with the words ‘mein bess’res Ich’. But Schumann did not wish to end the song at this point. Instead he decided on an ABA structure – such a glorious tune as he found for his opening could not be confined to a single appearance. He reintroduces the dotted rhythm quaver accompaniment early (to accompany the last two lines of the poem) so that when we hear ‘Du meine Seele’ for the second time the passionate engine of the piano writing has already gathered a head of steam, and the voice is gathered up within an irresistable musical momentum. Galvanised by the accompaniment’s new energy the singer relaunches the famous melody, this time marked ‘forte’. The composer repeats the poem’s ending to bring the singer’s role to a close, with a more uplifting sentiment (‘mein bess’res Ich’) than the more lugubrious sentiments of the sixth line. It is marvellous how an accelerando followed by a decisive ritardando, serve to heighten the impulsive give and take of the final cadence. This music seems invented on the spot; once again it is unusual in its combining of quixotic flourish and reverent genuflection.

The six-bar postlude is made up of new musical material. ‘You are my better self’ says the poet, and one can hear the beloved being put up on a pedestal as a guiding saint. We accept similar metaphors in Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch because, as here, the quality of the music is such that the sentimentality of cloying religiosity is avoided. What Schumann gets away with is little short of breathtaking: the pianist quotes the ‘Ave Maria’ melody from Schubert’s Ellens dritter Gesang (the poem of which is from Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake). We hear the rise and fall of this phrase twice, the second time softer and slower as if lost in reverential thought. After this a ghost of the opening fanfare in dotted rhythm brings the song to a close. In Schubert’s song Ellen prays to the Virgin to protect her father who is in hiding. But Schumann’s meaning is clear: Clara is my Madonna, and my better self. The pomp and ceremony of the opening has melted into private devotions: not only Ave Maria but Salve Regina.

It is fitting that Goethe should make an appearance in a work which re-defined and re-shaped the idea of the song-cycle. A serious lieder composer in 1840 could not avoid this great poet, but Schumann is clearly diffident about engaging with Weimar. Perhaps he felt that Mendelssohn would disapprove. For that reason he avoids any of the famous Goethe lyrics and chooses one that had been ignored by everyone else (Anton Rubinstein was to set it in a Russian translation in 1864). The source is Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan of 1819 where Freysinn (sic) is printed on page 8 as the third poem of the Moganni Nameh section of the Buch des Sängers (‘The Book of the Singer’). One can see why Schumann chose it as a means of introducing himself in fancy dress: it suited the international concept of Myrten and it enabled him to write a character piece in which an oriental disguise gave him an indefinable glamour. This is the signature tune of a liberal thinker who is in thrall to no man, free to travel under the stars, contemplating the glories of the heavens as he does so. A snag is that this is one of the very few songs in Myrten where there is no love interest; but it is surely meant as a counterpoise to the following Der Nussbaum – the heroic man rides a horse under the desert skies while the girl, safely at home under the nut tree, dreams of her distant lover and the time when he will return to marry her. At least the mood of Freisinn shows that the composer is determined to do just that.
All in all, Schumann gets away with the setting, but the aged Goethe has written a far more complex and dense poem (with ‘Kantian overtones’ as Eric Sams observes) than emerges in this setting. Hugo Wolf, who chose this section of the West-östlicher Divan for his Erschaffen und Beleben and Phänomen might have done it better justice. Another problem is that the music is not quite eastern enough to be different from other run of the mill horse-riding music. On the whole the Highland widow (No 10) is a more original horsewoman than this Bedouin. The most effective music is that for the second strophe where Schumann manages to conjure a mood of Koranic solemnity as jerky dotted rhythms are abandoned in favour of a rapt star-struck melody supported by a solemn chorale of crotchets. The music makes an attractive enough transition into the next great song, but it sounds rather too much like an item from Kinderszenen (a relation of Wichtige Begebenheit perhaps) with a text that has been added as an afterthought.

As far as Myrten is concerned Julius Mosen is the odd man out. All the other poets in the cycle make more than one appearance, but Mosen is included because he happens to have written a poem which was indispensable to the scenario. Schumann was not enthused by Der Nussbaum as a piece of literature, but the girl dreaming of her forthcoming marriage was too appropriate to ignore, as was the idea of Clara framed by a typically German outdoor picture which emphasised her qualities of purity and simple goodness. To match this, Schumann composed nothing more or less than a new folksong which enriched not only the lieder repertoire but the treasury of music which is counted as belonging to the people as a whole (just as Schubert had done when he composed Der Lindenbaum). There must be something about the idea of a German tree on German soil which goes to the root of the national musical consciousness. In celebration of their Fatherland, countless thousands have sung in unison of Schubert’s linden tree and Schumann’s nut tree without having the slightest idea of the names of the two composers.

Schumann’s song would not improve in choral performance; it is about intimacy and delicacy, and is one of those pieces which receives so many indifferent performances that a fine one can seem overwhelmingly fresh and fragrant. The piano writing, simple though it may seem, is also crucial. The stage is set with a little motif (the music gently ripples like the sighing of summer wind afar) which pervades the song. In the first instance this is simply an ornamented cadence (IV-V-I) in the key of G major, with a passing-note leaning on the dominant chord that pierces the heart and encapsulates all the longing felt by the girl who has to wait, and wait, for her beloved. The fact that we begin on the subdominant chord (an arpeggio in C major) gives the music a sense of both expectation and timelessness from the start – just as in the opening of Im wunderschönen Monat Mai in Dichterliebe. And if this motif seems half the length it should be is because the girl is waiting for her other half, and is incomplete in her single state. In the absence of her lover she maintains her colloquy with the piano: fragments of wind-borne phrases swapped between voice and accompaniment prophesy the loving exchanges which will take place between husband and wife.

Schumann has also come up with a wonderful vocal line. It is extraordinary how seven repetitions of the same note on the third of the scale – for that is how the melody begins – can be turned into something unique by the addition of a simple tag at the end consisting of a jump of a fourth which falls one tone to the fifth of the scale. This is simple stuff, but the bass line falling in steps, harmonising the tune as it does so, adds immeasurably to the sense of inevitability which is the mark of all instantly memorable folk music. The tempo marking of ‘Allegretto’ is crucial. Too slow, and the song sounds hopelessly self-conscious and contrived; too fast and one loses that extraordinary sense of gentle ennui that pervades the music while that little piano motif is repeated time and again in different registers and with slightly different emotional inflections. Of course these arpeggios are meant to describe the rustling leaves of the tree, which is perhaps why Schumann substituted the word ‘Blätter’ (leaves) for the poet’s ‘Äste’ (boughs) in the first strophe. But for all the movement in this lilting, wafting song, time stands still.

The first, second and fourth strophes of the poem are set to that indestructible little tune, which might have been hummed or whistled by those who do not care a jot for lieder. But it is in the middle section (represented by the poet’s third verse) that the full range of the composer’s art is shown. It is here that Schumann disregards Mosen’s fanciful metre and rhyme scheme and adds two words (printed in brackets in the text above) in order to facilitate a succession of falling sequences where the words wilt on the musical stave like a rose deprived of rain. The stretch of a seventh between ‘ach!’ and ‘selber’ at ‘wüsste ach! selber nicht was’ implies so much longing that it seems to be a muffled cry of desperation. After this the piano interlude is let off the leash with a sigh-in-music that is filled out with enough harmonic richness to suggest real passion. But then, for ‘Sie flüstern’, we immediately return to more etiolated textures. It is significant that at the end of this fourth strophe, on the revealing words ‘Flüstern von Bräut’gam und nächstem Jahr’, the voice and the right hand of the piano find themselves in unison for the first time. Up until this frank admission interactions between the two had consisted only of echo and shy imitation; now at last it is as if the soprano is made to lean on a firmly supporting arm.

The fifth strophe is reserved for a remarkable coda where the maiden’s dreaming is expressed in a whispered monotone. The vocal line dips beneath the swathes of piano writing as if she were gradually falling asleep. Ever more tranquil arpeggios murmur in sympathetic complicity as a ghost of that oft-repeated sighing motif slips imperceptibly beneath the pianist’s fingers; only on the very final ‘Schlaf und Traum’ do voice and accompaniment gently re-align. Der Nussbaum for all its folksiness is a highly sophisticated art song. The music’s tenacious repetitions of the same tiny phrases suggest that its subject is not simply true love, but rather obsession to the point of fantasy and unreality. Robert Schumann knew that Clara Wieck was as single-minded about him as he was about her, but his idealistic projections for the future failed to match humdrum everyday existence, and this gradually put their marriage under the greatest strain. No matter, this immortal song has Clara poised in anticipation of marriage for all time: she will forever be waiting and dreaming to the accompaniment of those wistful rustling semiquavers.

My heart is sad, I cannot reveal it,
My heart is sad for somebody;
I could lie awake during the longest night
And always dream of somebody.
Oh bliss! Of somebody;
Oh heavens! Of somebody!
I could roam through the whole world,
For the love of somebody.

My heart is sair, I dare na tell,
My heart is sair for Somebody!
I could wake a winter-night
For the sake o’ Somebody. –
Oh-hon! for Somebody!
Oh-hey! for Somebody!
I could range the world around
For the sake o’ Somebody. –

One of Robert Burns’s self-appointed tasks in the gathering of folksongs was his determination to be representative of all aspects of Scottish life in its various regions. His study of local musical history encompassed the songs of the Jacobites, a movement that had been dealt a deadly blow with the British troops’ defeat of Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, at Culloden Moor in 1746. (This event is referred to in another song from Myrten, Die Hochländer-Witwe, No 10.) Burns had not even been born when this catastrophe took place, but despite the fact that he had little sympathy for the Catholic Church (or any church for that matter), as a Scotsman he regarded the Jacobite rebellion with something approaching patriotic pride. During this period it was forbidden by English law for Scots even to toast the man ‘across the waters’ whom they believed was ‘born to be king’. A glance at the original poem for Jemand will make it plain that the ‘somebody’ referred to throughout, and whom the singer hopes will be kept ‘frae ilka danger’ is none other than the leader of the resurrected Stuart dynasty.

Bonnie Prince Charlie was a pin-up for countless Scottish girls, the equivalent of today’s football star. Whether Schumann made the correct historical connections when he read Gerhard’s translation of the poem is doubtful. As far as he was concerned the ‘somebody’ of whom the beautiful girl is dreaming was none other than himself, Bonnie Prince Robert. The discrete use of ‘somebody’ fitted perfectly with all the subterfuge to which the pair had to resort when Clara was still under the beadily jealous eye of her father. And in any case, Burns was perfectly aware that the poem could be read in two ways – both political and personal: that was the point of the lyric’s dissembling tone.

Somehow or other in this simple setting Schumann captures the lilt of Scottish folksong (Schubert achieved the same thing in his Walter Scott setting, Lied der Anne Lyle). Perhaps the composer knew some of the melodies which had been arranged by Haydn and Beethoven. Like the other Burns settings in Myrten there is a simplicity here which is more appropriate to the crofter’s cottage than to the salon. The ‘mezzo staccato’ chords of the introduction, with their intervening quaver rests, symbolise the very soul of discretion. They also seem indicative of lips determinedly pressed together. The singer has much in common with the girl who, in Die Stille from the Eichendorff Liederkreis Op 39, keeps a similar secret about a favourite man. The vocal line establishes a simple and direct mood which is ideal for a bright-eyed, diminutive Highland beauty (Amazons of the same region make their appearance later in the cycle). With the outburst of ‘O Wonne! Von Jemand; o Himmel! Von Jemand’ we realise that the natural ebullience of the singer has been suppressed by her dutiful pudeur. When she allows herself off the leash she seems to hug herself for joy that she has such a starry icon in her mind’s eye.

The second strophe has a change of colour: the appearance of the major key (E minor changes to E major) is accompanied by a change of tempo – the marking is ‘Langsamer’ to befit the prayerful tone. Some of the chordal progressions suggest religious music. Here piano and voice are often in unison, which seems to imply that the singer is marshalling all the powers of concentration at her command on behalf of the important ‘somebody’. Suddenly the music is ‘Lebhaft’; it is as if she were emerging from church into the bracing Scottish air. With the words ‘O Wonne! dem Jemand; O Himmel! dem Jemand!’ she positively whoops with joy. This volatile song comes to a breathless conclusion very much as if the girl, having let the cat out of the bag, lets all discretion fly to the winds. The music, hitherto in 2/4, switches into a dance movement in 6/8. This music is suddenly reminiscent of the final page of An meinem Herzen, an meiner Brust where the mother, overwhelmed by maternal joy, plays with her baby. This young lady has a similar devotion to her ‘somebody’ and she is as fierce as a tigress in her devotion to him. The four-bar postlude, a feast of syncopated off-beats, skips to a merry conclusion: ‘somebody’ is safe and out of the reach of the villains, call them whom you will – the British Redcoats or Friedrich Wieck.

With this song Schumann, who was fond of a drink, continues to flesh out his self-portrait with a touching frankness. The question is rhetorical but it requires a riposte. ‘How could I be happier than sitting alone?’ asks the happy solitary toper enjoying a glass of wine. The tenor of the whole cycle is the implicit answer to this question: companionship and love are far better than being on one’s own, and once he is married Schumann will put his bachelor habits behind him. (In fact, even after his marriage, the composer often needed to sit and think on his own with a glass of beer or wine.) This does not mean that Friedrich Wieck was justified in claiming that Schumann was a drunkard in trumped-up charges aimed at preventing his daughter’s marriage.

The poem, like all five of the Goethe settings in Myrten, comes from the West-östlicher Divan of 1819. The poem is the second in the Saki Nameh section of the work which has the subtitle Das Schenkenbuch (‘The Book of the Cupbearer’). The song is on a single page with an ad libitum Da Capo, an option seldom exercised on the concert platform: this miniature scherzo is eloquent enough in its brevity. The piano writing is just merry enough for us to believe that the cheeky octave stretches in the piano writing are meant to suggest inebriated hiccups. At the end of the song the two settings of the words ‘besser sein’ – the first straightforward, the second deliciously syncopated, are a clever musical depiction of a ‘merry’ state of mind. Of course such notions can lead to the type of exaggeration which has no place on the lieder platform, and this music is not meant to be a parody of drunkenness. It expresses the pleasure of solitude enlivened by the grape; this makes the drinker more thoughtful rather than less.

At ‘Niemand setzt mir Schranken’ the sudden change to 6/8 metre (and the softening of the tonality from E major to the uninhibited reaches C major) is a perfect musical depiction of the loosening and freeing effect of alcohol. There is a hint of rollicking in the swing of the rhythm, but the attention-seeking performer should never forget that the singer is still sitting as he sings it and not making a staggering exhibition of himself. With a return to the 2/4 of the opening the composer recapitulates the first two lines of the poem to make one of his ABA structures, a form he employs when the first section of a song has contained a memorable melody – as here. This is one of those Schumann songs when we are conscious of this composer’s ability to evoke sheer delight and in this case he seems to have conjured it from the most slender musical means.

This is one of the most extraordinary poems in the Myrten cycle. Schumann places and numbers it in a way that suggests it as a continuation of the preceding song; but in Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan, that poet’s grand tribute to the Persian poetry of the Middle Ages, the poems are separated by five pages of print. In fact the second of the ‘Schenkenbuch’ songs is made up of two separate texts. The first of these is addressed to a hobbledehoy of a waiter who displeases the poet by his graceless service; the 1811 vintage wine (‘Der Eilfer’) will be ruined by such clumsiness. The second is in complete contrast: the poet is delighted by the sight of a handsome youth whom he summons, Zeus-like, to be his cupbearer; the boy’s beauty will make any wine taste better.

It is something of a surprise to find Goethe exploring the homosexual aspects of fourteenth-century Persian culture in the time of the poet Hafiz. The eastern tradition of pederasty was reflected in Hafiz’s work, and at the age of seventy Goethe, the poet of Ganymed in earlier life, seems game enough to elaborate on this theme – although it is difficult to say whether he does this in the spirit of a literary exercise, as a mischievous pastiche, or with any sense of personal identification. The present example is only the beginning of a passionate (though not overtly sexual) relationship between ‘Dichter’ and ‘Schenke’ which is chronicled in the next fourteen pages of poetry. Whether in setting this text Schumann has followed, or sympathised with, Goethe’s literary games, is debatable. This entire subject is one which was seldom discussed at the time. Needless to say there have been abundant theories concerning homosexual sides to the natures of both Goethe and Schumann; unlike Schubert it could be said of both of them that they were happily married men. This is far from a cast-iron alibi (if alibi were needed) but it surely means that the onus of proof is on the speculators, and such proof is unlikely to surface.

One tiny textual point is interesting. In the first line of Dem Schenken (the beginning of this song’s second section) Goethe addresses his new cupbearer as ‘Du zierlicher Knabe’. This denotes beauty or attractiveness; the boy is good to look upon. In his setting Schumann changes this to ‘Du lieblicher Knabe’ which implies that the boy is sweet, or that he has a dear nature. The word ‘lieblich’ is more to do with character than physical allure. Mendelssohn set the same poem as a choral piece for men’s voices in 1840. This is Türkisches Schenkenlied Op 50 No 1. (The confusion of Turkish with Persian shows a surprising lack of familiarity with the literary sources of his beloved friend Goethe.) Interestingly enough, Mendelssohn retains the adjective ‘zierlich’. Just when one is about to praise his enlightened daring, we note that this composer has changed the phrase to ‘Du zierliches Mädchen’: he has simply turned the poet’s cupbearer into a young girl! This may have saved face in a Christian choral society, but the idea of a waitress in an inn is unthinkable for a Moslem; come to think of it, the idea of drinking wine is unacceptable in the first place. Moslem culture in former centuries seems to have been more relaxed on this, and a number of other issues. Where would western literature be, for example, if Omar Khayyám had been a teetotaller?

This miniature encapsulates two very different musical moods in quick succession. The movements of the clumsy oaf of a waiter are depicted in A minor and in a 6/8 rhythm: awkward accents in splayed octaves between the hands are all elbows and knees in the music. After this disorientation the music regains its equilibrium and dignity. The commanding tone of ‘Wer mir Wein bringt’ is imperious; this poet is not merely any old customer, he is a prince by virtue of his artistic calling. In a tiny two-bar postlude of lolloping octaves the ungainly youth skulks shiftily out of the picture.

The fermata on the octave E in the bass clef is full of expectancy. A minor changes to A major just as the poet glimpses a boy on the threshold. Schumann vividly manages to suggest the turning of the singer’s head from an unpleasant sight to an unexpectedly delightful one. The tempo changes from a furious ‘Rasch’ to something slower and more considered. The tone of the music is affectionate and admiring without for a moment appearing lascivious: it is as if Schumann were taking pleasure in the beauty of one of his own children (who were yet to be born of course). In this depiction the boy seems to move with the grace of a gazelle; he is as innocent as a breeze, and so are the composer’s reactions to that beauty. The nine-bar postlude is a marvel of cheeky winsomeness. It is possible that the composer meant to suggest a wink and nudge in this music; it certainly portrays delighted facial expressions. Is this mood the result of inebriation? Perhaps. But there is also something here of a teasing game, such as one may play with a kitten or a baby. In any case this music is startlingly original: no one else before Schumann could have written it, and its insouciant gait brings a smile to the pianist’s lips as he plays it. It has the sparkle of champagne and one can well believe that the wine brought by the cupbearer is pétillant.

Why is this poem included in the Myrten which is an anthology of love around the world. An argument could be made that Schumann was seeking to include homosexuals in his pantheon of lovers, acknowledging that they too had a place in any broad survey of human relationships. It seems unlikely however that twenty-first-century liberalism should be enshrined anachronistically in a work which mirrors nineteenth-century cultural values in Germany. Goethe was extremely unusual in dealing with this theme so openly; the second half of his book is devoted to scholarly notes which emphasise the intellectual nature of his homage to the east. It is far more likely that Schumann depicts himself here as a man whose bad-tempered patches would be alleviated by the beauty of his own offspring. A child on the threshold of his study would be welcomed and made to feel loved. And lo, before our ears, the self-absorbed drinker of the past turns into the loving father of the future. He will spurn pubs with their waiters and take his pleasures around the hearth. Clara was no doubt expected to take note.

This perfect little masterpiece is a jewel among Schumann’s Heine settings. The poem is to be found in the midst of the Lyrisches Intermezzo, the book from which Dichterliebe is taken. The song was composed some months before that cycle and included as No 7 of Myrthen (Clara’s wedding present for 12 September 1840) so it could never have been part of Dichterliebe. But its exotic background (the lotus is a flower connected, in its waterlily form, with Egypt and India) makes it unsuitable for Dichterliebe, and ideal for Myrthen, which was conceived as an anthology of love songs from around the world.

This is one of the most overtly sexual poems that Heine ever wrote, and its inclusion in Myrthen is a clear reference to the longed-for wedding night when the shy and virginal Clara would unveil herself to her husband, ‘trembling for love’ and anticipating ‘the pain of love’. As a result, Schumann is inspired to some of his most obvious musical references to Clara, using one of the codes associated with her name (see Eric Sams: The Songs of Robert Schumann, pages 22 to 26). These are the musical letters CAA interspersed with L (= B flat) and R (= G sharp) to make of the name CLARA the musical tune C – B flat – A – G sharp – A. When the song is sung in its original key of F major (as on this disc) this is the tune to which the words ‘Die Lotosblume ängstigt’ are set. Indeed, so keen is Schumann to have this word-in-music stand on its own as a magic motto that he allows this consideration to override his care for German grammar: in normal circumstances the two words making up the reflexive verb form ‘ängstigt sich’ would belong together; here they are separated by three beats. Heine is perhaps partly to blame for this because of the enjambment between the first and second lines of the poem, but performers have to take care to bridge this gap as much as possible by carrying the thought forward over the interlude.

The song, with the unusually spacious time signature of 6/4 (did Schumann know Loewe’s 1828 setting which is also in 6/4?) opens with a full bar of F major chords. When any composer sets up a song’s background in like manner we are led to expect a glorious melody in the foreground, and here we are not disappointed. After ‘ängstigt’ a deep minim ‘A’ resounds in the bass, a symbol of the waterlily’s deep roots in the watery depths. Since Egyptian times the flower has been a symbol for sexuality and fertility. Nourished beneath the water-line in mud and mire, the bloom itself is of the greatest beauty and purity, an apt metaphor for the healthy conjunction of lust and idealism in a loving relationship. Schumann’s song illustrates the moonlit beauty of the flower itself in the vocal line; but the basses, particularly in the opening eight bars, betoken an earthier, more urgent side of longing. In due course these basses rise to meet the feminine ideal until, at the end of the song, the vocal line, and both left and right hands, are enmeshed and combined. The message is that such a flower will respond only to gentle wooing (the moon) and not to the direct heat of the sun to which the less fragile and exotic blooms are drawn.

The first strophe comprises a long tendril of melody which is all of a piece despite the intermittent rests. The graceful musical obeisance at ‘und mit gesenktem Haupte’ is beautiful word-painting, and momentarily turns the lotus into a wallflower as she declines to take part in the dance in order to await the arrival of her true love. For a moment all is tremulous expectancy. At ‘Erwartet sie träumend die Nacht’ the music modulates into the dominant of F major (C major). Here the texture magically attenuates so that we fancy that we can see, even feel, the moonlight in which the music is suddenly bathed. This change is brought about by the absence of a bass line in the accompaniment; gentle pulsations in the piano move into A flat major, and we seem to be speaking of love of the most rarefied kind. A miracle this – simple enough when seen on paper, but only the greatest composers can achieve the sound which instantaneously conveys the colour of which a poem speaks. In this rapturous mood Schumann, moved by unimaginable depths of emotion in relation to his own feelings for Clara, has few equals.

To describe the harmonic and textural changes at this point is almost to forget that the vocal cantilena continues to enchant us purely as long, spinning melody. The unveiling of the ‘flower-face’ (in reality an unveiling more complete than that image allows) is accomplished with a melody that moves into the enthusiastic heights of the stave for the first time. The idealistic, other-worldly reaches of A flat major return to the warmer reality of F major. On ‘Blumengesicht’ a shift to the first inversion of A7 gives the music a new sense of suspense, and crescendo markings in both piano and vocal staves add to a sense of building excitement. In fact the music is cut adrift from the home key for the following six bars and pushes urgently forward to some resolution. It is difficult not to believe that the passionate accelerando (‘nach und nach schneller’) beginning at ‘Sie blüht und glüht und leuchtet’ does not have a sexual connotation in the composer’s mind. The idea of a virgin glowing and shining and looking up speechless to the sky, perhaps at the climactic moment of ecstasy, seems to have excited Schumann a great deal. The pulse of the music moves into an excitable two in a bar until the ever more urgent piano triplets propel the voice to the word ‘zittert’, set on the highest notes of the piece (an awkward G and F) and which usually comes out in performance as a slightly uncontrolled exclamation.

This is a shudder of sexual release if ever there was one in music, and it initiates the winding-down process with which the song, now marked with a ‘ritard’, comes to its end. The last line of the poem (‘Vor Liebe und Liebesweh’) is repeated and sinks down in stages to the bottom of the stave, as if in satiated fulfilment. The first time these words are set the vocal line is exactly doubled by the piano; as if in speechless exchange of gratitude and emotion this melody is concealed within the little piano interlude which introduces the final vocal echo. The lack of postlude reminds us that as far as Schumann is concerned his longing is still unfulfilled; whatever has happened in the song is only a dream of what will be. In the same way the postludes of certain love songs in Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch remind us that the bravado and passion of the song is the result of no more than fervid fantasy and fond imaginings.

The connection with Mendelssohn has already been mentioned in the introduction to Myrten. In Heine’s Buch der Lieder (1827) this poem is No X in the Lyrisches Intermezzo section. It stands next to that most famous of Mendelssohn’s lyrics Auf Flügeln des Gesanges (IX), a poem which Schumann, after setting the first seven poems in the sequence for his own Dichterliebe, studiously avoided. In any case the eastern theme of that lyric (even if he had dared to envisage a rivalry with Mendelssohn in making his own setting) did not fit the Dichterliebe scenario. The same could be said of Die Lotosblume, which was in fact Schumann’s debut as far as the Buch der Lieder was concerned. He set it in February 1840 and returned to compose Dichterliebe in May of the same year.

It was a distinguished coup d’essai; but one wonders whether Schumann knew Carl Loewe’s wonderfully expressive (and much longer) setting in G sharp minor (Op 9 No 1, composed in 1828, only a year after the poem’s publication) which was the opening of that composer’s Heinescher Liederkreis. Perhaps it is only a coincidence that both songs have 6/4 time signatures. Loewe’s prosody at the words ‘ängstigt sich’ is better (the words belong together as two parts of a reflexive verb) but Schumann has the advantage of an absolutely marvellous tune. Indeed, the separation of ‘ängstigt’ and ‘sich’ by a dotted minim rest in Schumann’s setting suggests that he considered the melody paramount, and it is this which had occurred to him first.

In normal circumstances lieder scholars could ‘tut tut’ about this; but criticism is silenced by musical magic. Seemingly effortlessly, Schumann outclasses Loewe with the sheer quality of his inspiration – a rapt and exotic melody for an exotic bloom. The flower itself is a metaphor for a woman in Heine’s poem; because it is a plant that flourishes in mud and slime bearing flowers that belie its origins, the Indians see it as symbolic of the inevitable connections between the dark cesspits of physicality and the glowing realms of beauty and idealism. There is accordingly a sexual agenda in Schumann’s setting. We have already spoken about the pudeur of the pert singer of Jemand, but in Die Lotosblume we sense more than Scottish modesty: here is a tradition of woman’s obedience to man (‘mit gesenktem Haupte’) that is centuries older than the German nineteenth-century ideal of womanhood. The music wears a veil, and must be performed in a veiled manner, at least for the first three lines; this is not to say that there is any suggestion of grovelling subservience – the keynote of the opening is serious dignity.

The tune, flower-like, is supported by the deep roots of the bass line which, in the first verse, moves in the sonorous depths of the piano. Mention is made of the strength of the sun, but this music is a sublime nocturne from the outset. The lotus flower has a secret lover, the moon. At the beginning of the second verse those deep basses are replaced by an etiolated texture where both of the pianist’s hands are in the treble clef: this rising of the moon is accompanied by a change of key to A flat major. Both these metamorphoses suggest a prisoner unchained, a bird freed from its cage. The music becomes light-headed. At ‘Und ihm entschleiert sie freundlich’, as if emboldened by a rush of blood to the head, the voice rises up the stave as if it were physically emboldened to fly heavenward to greet its paramour. Only very briefly (on the word ‘freundlich’) do we return to the home key of F major. Music that has begun with almost immovable poise now becomes turbulently chromatic and passionate. An accelerando pushing the music on to that crucial word ‘zittert’ (‘shivers’) creates an air of breathless rapture. To descend from such heights is never easy, and to do so quickly is harder still. Perhaps it is a flaw of the song that it comes to such a sudden end only four bar later as the vocal line falls to a lower tessitura; not even a pair of ritardando markings manage to create the necessary poise. (It is notable that on this occasion Schumann avoids a recapitulation of that beautiful opening melody.) On the other hand, as Eric Sams points out, this conclusion does convey a feeling of ‘unstilled longing’ which is at the heart of the lyric.

That Schumann regarded this poem as erotic is without question and in so doing he tuned into Heine’s own metaphors. The thrill is that something so shy and retiring as the lotus flower should become so openly passionate when unveiled. The shy anxiety of the opening betokens sexual inexperience. Not able to give herself to the crude embraces of sun she reserves her passion for a secret lover who is a master of the more subtle caress. He entices her to his embrace. The words (and the music of the third verse) are nothing more than a depiction of deflowering. With ‘Sie blüht und glüht und leuchtet’ (that succession of vowels onomatopoeically glows) an accelerando begins which is the stirring of excitement, not only the poet’s but the woman’s also. Unable fully to understand what is happening she looks up speechlessly to the sky; her body gives off fragrances (‘sie duftet’), she weeps … and she shudders. This is the climactic moment of the music which also marks the return to the home key; she has come full circle. After this there is a descent from the plateaux of paradise and a contemplation of love’s pain; awakened to new pleasures it will not be long before she opens herself once again to the moonlight.

So much of this cycle is a projection of the happiness that would be shared by the newly married couple, and it is hardly surprising that the composer was impatient for his honeymoon. Schumann’s achievement here is to write a song which is both metaphysically moving and physically explicit. This is his promise to be a good lover and provide Clara with a whole new realm of pleasure. Nevertheless it takes courage and skill on the part of the two performers to traverse the song’s wide boundaries, travelling from the depths of oriental obscurity to the heights of sexual enlightenment, and all in the twinkling of an eye.

The poem is from the West-östlicher Divan; it appears immediately after Freisinn in the opening section of the book subtitled Moganni Nameh or The Book of the Singer. Goethe points out that east and west are united by a single deity and that, by implication, the oriental-style verse of his collection has a global relevance. Schumann is less concerned with the humanistic side of the lyric than the opportunity it gives him for Thousand and One Nights colouring. He sets the first two verses and then repeats the opening lines of the first strophe; after this he sets the third verse and repeats the first strophe in its entirety, tagging on ‘Amen’ (which he also repeats) from the second. He ignores the fourth verse, as well as the longer strophe which concludes the poem. Goethe’s title means ‘Talismans’ and as such Schumann felt free to choose from the collection of five epigrams published under this single heading by the poet. If he had any later reservations about this setting it concerned the scale of the music which he must have thought was too modest for the sweeping grandeur of the verbal sentiments. In 1849 he made a mighty setting of the same words for SATB double chorus (published as Op 141 No 4). The stirring peroration of this piece culminates in ‘Amen’ repeated no less than seven times. In 1829 Loewe had composed an exemplary choral setting (Op 22, published 1832) which linked all these talismans together; the five verses are treated as different sections which contribute to a greater whole. For Myrten Schumann writes a powerful, if compressed, miniature: praises to the ruler of the universe are accomplished with what may seem immodest haste.

The music is marked ‘Feierlich’ in the celebratory key of C major. With the quick flourish of a single quaver in the accompaniment we move from dominant to tonic; a C major semibreve chord supports the voice’s wide-ranging dotted rhythms – ‘Gottes ist der Orient!’. Without any attempt genuinely to mirror eastern music or Islamic custom Schumann seems to have imagined a call to prayer from a fairytale minaret. The fact that the undulations of this vocal line stand apart from the piano (here provider of a purely supportive harmony) adds to this impression. (Goethe heard such incantations for himself when a Turkish regiment was stationed in Weimar during the Napoleonic Wars.) The piano punctuates these invocations to east and west with hefty quaver chords which cleave the air like brandished scimitars, as if ready to lop off the heads of infidels. The whole tone of this music is judgmental. The composer has shaped the vocal line in a gestural way which suggests the worshipper’s obeisances – first in one direction of the compass, then the other. The second verse is set to music which somehow suggests religious instruction from a learned and venerable mullah putting the fear of God into his awestruck congregation. The twin invocations to the single deity of both east and west are repeated as a bridge into the third strophe.

This is entirely different and seems to have been written for another, higher voice altogether. The first page of the song is low for any tenor, and suddenly the singer finds himself in a more fitting tessitura. (When a baritone performs the song the opposite happens: the first page is very comfortable, and the second impossibly constricted.) The key signature changes into one sharp (E minor/G major). The first strophes have been about rules and obedience, and the tight rhythmic structure of the music reflects the straight and narrow. Those who fall into sin and error have no such discipline in their lives, and accordingly the music, branching out into aimless quavers, is made to wander across the bar line in a succession of two-bar phrases which float and weave with an almost drunken freedom. (Sams points out a similarity to ‘All we like sheep’ from Messiah.) Unlike the opening of the song this section is actually addressed directly to the deity. Fleeting quavers on the upbeat for ‘du’ (at ‘doch du weisst’ and gib du meinem Weg’) seem astonishingly casual for this purpose, but Schumann does not respect the conventional niceties of religious music: where else, for example, would one find the word ‘Amen’ set to a pair of perfect, rather than plagal, cadences?

At ‘Wenn ich handle’ there is a bridge passage which naturalises the sharp in the key signature and prepares a return to the key of C major. The vocal line is so high that Schumann published an ossia for lower voices; the original, which suggests the desperate fanaticism of a soul within reach of salvation, is more effective. The first verse is now exactly repeated as Schumann once again employs his familiar ABA structure. By way of a coda there are two solemn repetitions of ‘Amen’; the downwardly-plunging leaps of a fifth seem vividly suggestive of the repeated self-abasements of the worshipper on his prayer mat.

The appearance of Suleika in Myrten is as much of a tribute to Schubert as the quotation of his Ave Maria in the dedicatory song. What neither Schubert nor Schumann were ever to know was that Goethe’s friend Marianne von Willemer had assumed the role of ‘Suleika’ to the poet’s ‘Hatem’, and that the exchanges of the elderly sage with this clever, imaginative and spirited woman had woven a spell unique in literary history. Goethe incorporated a number of Marianne’s poems into his West-östlicher Divan without divulging the truth. (This omission was neither mean-spirited nor plagiaristic – Goethe had no need of literary theft – but it protected the privacy of Marianne who was a married woman – married moreover to one of Goethe’s friends, Johann Jakob Willemer, who was only some eleven years younger than the great poet.) It remains very much an open question as to whether the passionate love affair implied by these poems was a mirror of reality or merely a picture of what might have been under different circumstances. Bearing in mind that Offenbach near Frankfurt (where Marianne and her husband lived) was a long way from Weimar, and that the two met seldom in the flesh, the latter seems more likely to have been the case.

Marianne (with a touch of Goethean editing) wrote the two remarkable Suleika poems, addressed to the east and west winds, which were set by Schubert. But Wie mit innigstem Behagen (printed on page 177 of the first edition of the Divan, towards the end of the Suleika Nameh – The Book of Suleika) seems to have been a collaboration with Goethe providing the poem’s third verse. It was written as a reply to Abglanz (‘Reflection’), a poem to be found on the same page of the Divan. Here Goethe talks touchingly about being alone in his widower’s house (his wife had died in 1816); as he looks into the mirror he fancies that he sees his beloved Suleika with him, but when he turns around she has vanished. He then looks into his lieder – his songs – and, lo and behold, she is there. And she can only go on getting more and more beautiful in the framework of his poetic invention.

Schumann’s song is Willemer’s heartfelt response to this poem. The word ‘Lied’ which begins the second line refers back to her receipt of Abglanz. (The third strophe, Goethe’s addition, refers back to the mirror, the idea of which has been at the heart of his poem – and of this musical setting as it happens.) Willemer/Suleika is touched by the idea that distance is no hindrance to her magical presence by the poet’s side. She is always there because of his writing and creativity. Why Robert felt that this was relevant to Clara is easy to guess. When she was on tour, and under paternal surveillance in those dark days of 1838 and 1839, Robert’s presence was conjured for her, almost physically as the poem suggests, by his music. In playing Schumann’s music, or even thinking about it, the link between Robert and his distant Clara was as strong as that between Suleika and Hatem, or Willemer and Goethe. Robert even wrote out the poem in Leipzig and sent it to Clara (then in Austria) on 20 April 1838. (In the same letter he wrote to her: ‘Don’t you write poetry then Clara? – No, because you yourself are a poem!’.)

It is clear then that when Clara saw the song set to music in Myrten she would have recognised the poem as belonging to their shared past. It is as if it were dedicated to all lovers, past and future, who have had to nurture their affections in long-distance relationships. Closeness is not about physical proximity the poem seems to say, but the music itself shows singer and pianist in an astonishingly close bond. Every single note of the vocal line is doubled – one might also say shadowed – by the accompaniment; this is surely something of a record in a medium where it is conventional wisdom that such doubling reduces the efficacy of the vocal line. If the pianist were to play the accompaniment as it stands (and on its own) the listener would not be deprived of a single fragment of melody – the whole tune occurs unfailingly in the little finger of the right hand. It is this unanimity which makes the song extremely difficult to perform. The piece requires an extremely flexible rubato, a plasticity of expression; despite this surging and variable pulse singer and pianist need to sound absolutely at one, even in passages with ornamental turns. This is a real challenge to the musical empathy of the two artists concerned, but it primarily tests the accompanist’s ability to listen.

If one asks why Schumann has written the music in this way the key word ‘mirror’ comes to mind. Voice and piano are superimposed on each other, mirroring the synchronicity of movement between a form and its ghostly double. That these move in the opposite direction from each other in spatial terms is reflected in the postlude. Entwined counterpoint in contrary motion roves over the two staves and indicates a conversation of male and female voices as well as a colloquy of mirror images: ascending scales in the pianist’s right hand are seen and heard as descending in his left.

In musical terms the opening strophe of the song is set to an enchanting melody which nevertheless manages to encompass the contours of natural speech, and to suggest that the formulation of ideas and feelings is taking place then and there. (This is true of the improvised feel to the music throughout the song.) This is a style which owes much to the female impulse, both tender and passionate, of such songs as Du Ring an meinem Finger and Süsser Freund from Frauenliebe und -leben. The second strophe is less sinuously melodic, beginning with figurations of gradual chromatic ascent separated by crotchet rests; once again these suggest spontaneous improvisation as well as breathless emotion. The turning of harmonic screws, the marking ‘nach und nach schneller’ (‘faster and faster’), and the thrust of the quavers in the accompaniment which support and transport the voice as if on a magic carpet, seem to describe an ever-quickening heartbeat and an ever more fervent sense of devotion.

This leads back to the opening melody for the poem’s third verse; the AB structure of the song’s opening page is now repeated. This leads to the words ‘im Gewand der Poesie’ at the end of the fourth strophe after which the pianist has a marvellous little interlude, only a single bar, but a moment where yearning seems to combine with a graceful acceptance of the physical distance between the lovers. The song is completed by a repeat of the first verse (thus the form of the whole is ABABA) followed by that eloquent four-bar coda where the two mirrored forms seem to melt one into the other.

This is no folksong gathered from the Scottish countryside; Burns was the author of the poem. He would have had all the details of the Culloden massacre etched on his heart: after the battle was fought on 16 April 1746 the Duke of Cumberland, encamped at Fort Augustus, sent off detachments of soldiers to plunder the surrounding countryside. This resulted in the destruction of the castles of Lovat, Glengary and Lochiel. The cottages of tenant farmers were demolished or burned to the ground; their cattle were driven away, and the families of the rebels were either put to the sword, died in the fires, or were forced to wander homeless and starving on the scorched heath.

When we encounter this music for the first time we imagine that the Scottish widow (without orphans) is galloping as she sings. The vocal line bounces in the saddle supported by the piano’s prancing triplets (shared between the hands in the unusual rhythm of 6/16); between them these suggest an equestrian song with even greater efficacy than the dotted rhythms in the second song in the cycle, Freisinn. On the other hand there is no possibility, from Burn’s point of view, that this woman, who has lost everything in the world, would have had the means to be anything other than on foot. She is a beggar who has taken many weeks to walk to the low country. The melody ascribed to her lyric by Burns himself is melancholic and slow.

It seems likely, therefore, that Schumann has been influenced by a later song in Myrten – Hauptmanns Weib, where horse-riding is associated with the captain’s wife. The scenario in Schumann’s mind seems to have been the following: the massacre of Culloden has just taken place, and the singer has fought alongside her fallen husband. After the Scottish troops are routed she sets off on her charger and brings the news of this catastrophic defeat to the wider world, more specifically to us, the audience of Myrten. In fact she seems to be telling us about the terrible sequence of events without dismounting, and as her horse moves through the stalls. The postlude has her galloping off into the distance as she prepares to spread word of English infamy in all directions.

It is also possible that the accompaniment depicts only anger and outrage, that these triplets represent stifled sobs and stabs of resentment where the turbulence of the music represents her emotions rather than her physical movements – on horseback for example. But the marking of ‘Rasch, nach an nach heftig’ (the composer requires the music to gather weight and momentum as it progresses) and the way those cries of ‘O Weh! O Weh! O Weh!’ are thrown to the wind suggest that she is a warrior at full tilt. Schumann sees the Scots as a warlike race, an impression that a reading of Ossian (or an acquaintance with the Schubert settings of Ossian which were published between 1830 and 1850) would have reinforced.

The bottled-up fury of this music takes on the aspect of a menacing tribal chant which is of course appropriate; revenge is in the air and this is at the expense of what might have been the truly pathetic and woebegone nature of ‘O Weh! O Weh! O Weh!’ in the hands of other composers (the settings of the forgotten G Dullo and E Schweiger, listed in Challiers Catalogue, 1885, are unknown to me). The key is E minor but it is remarkable how Schumann manages this scherzo in such a way that the embattled woman’s different memories have separate colours and nuances, often with a major-key tonality, attached to each of them. There is no strophic laziness here, and no stock repeats, but we somehow hear the music as if it were repetitive in a strophic manner; in this it resembles some of Schubert’s finest achievements where he fools the ear into hearing something as all of a piece when it is in fact a cleverly laid mosaic with repeated phrases occurring asymmetrically. Despite the song’s implacable movement we still register the widow’s pleasure in remembering her Donald’s handsomeness and the strength of their relationship. It is as if an almost involuntary smile passes over her lips as she adumbrates her possessions – Donald having being the chief of them.

The idyll of Highland life remembered in the first verses suddenly stops with ‘So blieb’s’, actually the first words of the sixth strophe. (There is good reason here for the performers to allow a short fermata in the music.) The shift into C major for the continuation of the words is wonderfully effective; here the submediant has the effect of a plagal passage in a song which suddenly refers to God or the Church. The advent of Charlie Stuart has occasioned all this horror and loss, but we are left in no doubt by the tone of the music that he is a hero and that his cause is still a shining one. She does not blame the Bonnie Prince but goes on to give a brief outline of the way in which the outcome of Culloden was a victory of evil over good. The singers have to allow time for the rhetorical question (‘Wer weiss es nicht?’) to be answered by her own tight-lipped ‘right to the wrang died yield’. Defiance is the keynote here, with tears fought back. We sense helplessness and desperation allied to a grim determination to set things aright somehow. The portrait is bleak but is shot through with humanity and even touches of rueful humour. Schumann has miraculously caught the Scottish fighting spirit and the national grit – perhaps here better than in any of his Burns settings. Clara was hereby commanded to be as stoic in adversity as this heroine: the bravery-in-music of the Scottish widow was insurance against Clara losing heart in the ongoing battle against her father.

Like almost all of Schumann’s Rückert settings these poems come from the vast collection by this most prolific of poets which is known as Liebesfrühling. Lied der Braut No 1 (the composer’s title, not the poet’s) is No XXXI of the Vierter Strauss (‘fourth bouquet’) of the collection (1834).

Once again Robert is putting words into Clara’s mouth – the fantasy Clara who is the prototype of all brides, and whose love for the composer knew no bounds. Here the bride-to-be addresses her mother. Clara’s father took such an important role in her life that her other parent has been all but forgotten. Marianne Wieck (née Tromlitz, 1797-1872) was a gifted pianist and singer who became a pupil of Friedrich Wieck. She married him in 1816; at the time she was nineteen and her husband thirty-one. She bore him five children (four boys and a girl – Clara of course) in the eight years they were married. Wieck was impossibly authoritarian with more than a touch of fanaticism; his personality seems to have been too much for Marianne to bear. When they separated in 1824 Clara was only five. At the time it was almost unheard of in such cases for the mother to be granted custody of the children against the father’s wishes; Wieck retained rigid control over his family; only the youngest baby boy, Viktor, stayed with Marianne. After the divorce she moved to Berlin and married Adolf Bargiel who became father to Clara’s half-brother, the composer Woldemar Bargiel. In 1828 Wieck married Clementine Fechner who bore him a number of children including the pianist Marie Wieck who failed to achieve Clara’s fame. There is no record of especially close relations between Clara and her stepmother.

Contact between mother and daughter was amiable enough, but at a distance. They corresponded, and Clara saw Marianne on visits to Berlin, but one could never imagine the intimate scenario of Rückert’s poem taking place between this pair of women. As it happened, Marianne Bargiel was supportive of the young couple’s desire to marry, and winning her approval for their contested marriage plans was an important legal coup for Schumann. No, the person to whom Schumann imagines Clara addressing her pleas for release was her father, Friedrich Wieck: all of Rückert’s assurances that love engenders love, and that parents will be more, rather than less, loved in setting their children free, were surely meant for his ears via Robert’s music.

The music is marked ‘Andantino’ and ‘Sehr innig’. The Vorspiel, a single gesture initiated by a spread chord in G major, is shyly demure and yet clingy; one can already see the tone of pleading in the singer’s eyes. The gentle little melody is borne along by semiquavers which incorporate unusually large stretches, as if the accompanist’s right hand symbolises the act of entreating, of needing to reach out to someone who refuses to be included in a circle of love. The ornamentation at ‘also sehr’ is prophetic of the decorative elaborations of the vocal line in Er, der Herrlichste von allen from Frauenliebe und -leben; adoration of the husband-to-be is at the heart of both songs.

The music for the second four lines becomes more urgent (it is marked ‘schneller’), as if the opening music has not been convincing enough. We sense that the invisible interlocutor in this song is not making it at all easy for the singer. Between the verses she (or he, if an imaginary Wieck) has postulated that the bride-to-be is ungrateful, and that she is not dutiful enough in her filial love. The riposte is spirited; she offers to kiss her parent as she has learned to with her paramour. (Perhaps this would not be such a good idea!) Schumann allows the very thought of this enrapturing kiss between lovers to provoke a repeat of ‘wie mich er, mich er’ which launches the voice into a high F sharp on the word ‘er’ (he) held for four beats. Beneath this the piano writing falls in sighing quavers, a cadenza of a kind, and the equivalent of a shiver of rapture which runs down the spine as well as the stave.

For her final bout of pleading the girl suggests that her discovery of romantic love has only now made her grateful for her very existence – something she owes to her mother. Setting the word ‘ihn’ as a minim (which is placed to rhyme with ‘ziehn’), and the fact that this word must be enjambed with the following verb ‘liebe’, requires the singer to take a mighty breath and to move the pace forwards. But this is the only moment of forced prosody in a song which perfectly conveys the mixed tone of affection and impatience with which children address their parents; it sounds improvised, as if the singer were thinking on her feet as to how best to explain her feelings and justify them. Another thought that occurs to me is that this is a nineteenth-century forerunner of Poulenc’s La voix humaine where we are presented with only one side of a conversation and must guess what is being said in the other half of the colloquy.

This miniature ends with a passage with a vocal peroration (a cadential phrase encompassing a high A) which is as radiant as the words which have inspired it. The postlude is a long one, especially in the context of this short song. This beautiful, tender piano music perfectly conveys the physical rapprochement that is beyond words and explanations. It is enough that one realises that the singer has at last got through to her parent. Memories of the caresses she has enjoyed with her beloved fuel a new-found emotional freedom which enables her to establish a more spontaneous means of communication with her family. Rarely does Schumann show himself to be a more understanding and tender commentator on human nature.

This poem comes from Rückert’s Liebesfrühling where it follows on in the sequence of the poet’s lyrics from its predecessor; it is this which must have suggested to Schumann the musical enjambment where there is a change of neither key nor time signature between the two connected numbers. Lied der Braut No 2 is, once again, the composer’s title, not the poet’s. It is No XXXII of the Vierter Strauss of the collection.

The tempo marking is ‘Larghetto’ in 2/4. In the previous song she has broken through the barrier of the mother’s (or father’s) resistance to her confession of love; now she seeks approval and support rather than mere acceptance. There is a stillness in this single-page song which suggests that the singer is speaking not face to face, but rather heart to heart. It is as if she finds herself in that sacrosanct ‘Kämmerlein’ – the little room in which the heroine of Frauenliebe und -leben at the beginning of that cycle is able to voice her hopes and fears about an uncertain future. Not surprisingly that song is also marked ‘Larghetto’ and is filled out with crotchets which are also tremulously mezzo staccato, as if both women, blinded by love’s power, were feeling their way. We realise that the ‘Braut’ is murmuring these words while in the physical embrace of her mother – the exchange is murmured in the deepest intimacy.

Once again we hear only her side of the conversation: the mother’s solicitous questions are inaudible. The girl is more or less asking for permission to embark on a physical relationship (within wedlock of course!). More than anything else she desires her mother’s blessing on the union. The poignantly pleading ‘Lass mich’ at the end of the song (the repetitions are the composer’s) is most affecting. This letting go is a turning point in any relationship between parent and child, and Schumann marks the moment with a masterpiece where the simplicity of the musical means masks a profound understanding of how two generations communicate across the years’ divide. One is reminded of the affectionately cajoling tone of the composer’s own eloquent letters to his mother when he somehow persuaded her to allow him to follow a musical career.

How will this love affair end?, the concerned mother asks. How will things turn out? Are you sure that your feelings will not change? Sweetly steadfast, the girl can envisage neither change, nor the end of something which seems eternal. I do not yet know, she says, how things will change. But we, the listeners, are better informed; and those who know the full, sad story of the Schumanns’ marriage (and its tragic conclusion marred by illness and terrible confusion) find these almost foolishly radiant and optimistic sentiments all the more poignant as a result.

My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here;
My heart’s in the Highlands a-chasing the deer;
Chasing the wild deer, and following the roe
My heart’s in the Highlands wherever I go. –

Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North,
The birthplace of Valour, the country of Worth;
Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,
The hills of the Highlands for ever I love. –

Farewell to the mountains high covered with snow;
Farewell to the straths and green valleys below;
Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods
Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods;

My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here;
My heart’s in the Highlands a-chasing the deer;
Chasing the wild deer, and following the roe –
My heart’s in the Highlands wherever I go.

Robert Burns (1759-1796)

Wilhelm Gerhard’s translation of Burns is close to the original; accordingly we have printed Burns’s poem as the translation of the song text. The Lowlander’s concept of the ‘north’ is not rendered into German, and the Highlands become the ‘cradle of freedom and valour’ rather than of the more difficult to render ‘worth’. The second line of the third verse may need some explanation: ‘strath’ has entered the English dictionary with two meanings: a broad river valley bounded by hills and high grounds and, in more archaic usage, a stretch of flat land by the waterside. Burns probably means the latter in this case as he goes on to praise ‘green valleys below’. It is also a line which has foxed the translator: accordingly we have ‘valleys filled with flowers and clover’ as a kind of floral tribute from Gerhard and Germany. The title is Schumann’s own.

This is probably the least interesting song in the cycle from the psychological point of view. It is not a conventional love song and its placement in Myrten is also hard to justify. (The possible link between Mendelssohn, the Highlands and this song is touched on earlier in this booklet.) This is a hearty paean of praise with a swinging musical tune that does not even attempt to convey the ache of separation from the singer’s homeland. (The tender little folk melody published with Burns’s poem is marked ‘Slow’.) Certainly the modulation from the B minor of Schumann’s first two verses to the B major of the third adds a note of tenderness in passing, but nothing to pull the heartstrings. What the composer does achieve on the other hand is a vocal melody which, in its progressions of I-IV-I-V, has something of the air of a genuine Scottish folksong. The piano ritornello which is heard at the beginning of each verse, and also as a postlude, suggests hearty annoyance at having to leave rather, than nostalgia or tears in the eye. In fact this music has the rallying qualities of a communal song, and Schumann possibly envisaged this lied as less of a personal statement than as a rollicking drinking ditty.

Dotted rhythms at ‘dort jagt es den Hirsch und verfolget das Reh’ are clearly meant to illustrate the prancing of the deer and are less appropriate to the meaning of later strophes. This music bears an uncommon resemblance to the diminished arpeggios for dancing ghosts in Schubert’s song Der Geistertanz. This must be a coincidence as Schubert’s song was first published, as part of the Nachlass, in June 1840, some four months after Hochländers Abschied was composed. Adolf Jensen’s bracing setting of the Burns (Op 49 No 1, 1869) is in duple rather than triple time, but its ‘Allegro risoluto’ marking clearly takes its cue from Schumann. The translation of the lyric used by Jensen was by Freiligrath; this was also set by Robert Franz (Op 31 No 6, c1870).

This is such an important poem (not least because countless singers perform it in Benjamin Britten’s setting without understanding the dialect) that it is worthwhile translating some of the unfamiliar words. The word ‘balou’ means ‘lullaby’. The woman singing to her baby is clearly not married to the father, the ‘wanton Chief’ of the Ronald clan who ‘brawlie kens’ (knows all too well) in what circumstances the child, the little Highland thief of the future, was conceived. The line ‘Leeze me on thy bonnie craigie’ means ‘I am delighted by’ – or ‘blessings on’ – your beautiful throat (or neck). A ‘naigie’ is a small horse or a pony and ‘Lawlands’ are Lowlands of course: this Highland boy will be raised to plunder the goods and chattels of the rival Scots to the south as much as those of the English enemy. The verb ‘furder’ means to go on, progress or succeed; in this case the mother imagines her son speeding over the English border in order to steal a cow from Carlisle; on the way he will ‘harry the louns’ or plunder the rogues of the ‘laigh Countrie’ or Lowlands. ‘Syne’ simply means ‘then’: after all these heroic (not to say criminal) exploits the thief will duly return to his mother.

One should not perhaps blame Gerhard (and thus Schumann) for not capturing the tone of independence and strength in these gleefully amoral words which flout all authority. Quite apart from the idea of bringing up a child to aspire to illegal activities, Burns is alone in his time for allowing his characters (as he allowed himself) to glory in the joys of parenthood out of wedlock. The poet seems to have linked the joys of sex with the pleasures of fatherhood; his own illegitimate children were a matter of pride and affection for him in an age which very often treated them otherwise. This mother seems completely unworried about the illegitimacy of her son; instead she seems positively to relish the memory of his conception. (It is a crucial detail like this which is lost, and had to be lost, in the German translation. The most Gerhard will allow is that the rest of the clan realises who the father is by the colour of the baby’s hair.) It would be a mistake to assume that Burns’s own contemporaries were not shocked by poems such as this. The poet himself disowned these words at first: they were published anonymously in the Museum. It was later said that these were originally Gaelic which Burns had merely rendered into low country dialect, but his own hand in this poem seems apparent in every delicious line.

Schumann composes a charming strophic song – a little lullaby with ethnic touches. Those winsome syncopations which leap upwards in fourths, fifths and then sixths in the vocal line seem to capture the lilt of Scottish speech; the composer may even have imagined that the dominant pedal (which pervades the bass clef almost throughout) evoked the drone of the pipes. But on the whole the music cannot be said to cross over the borders of Biedermeier prettiness: the idea of a lullaby with the gently rocking movement of the cradle in D major is beautifully sustained, a highly effective foil to the manly bluster of the preceding song in B minor. Both simple and vocally challenging, this music contains delight a-plenty, as well as tenderness; but in this cosy atmosphere where Robert surely projects Clara and his own children, yet unborn, there is little trace of the wild northern culture that spawned these words, nor of the gloriously shameless hussy who sings them. Britten’s The Highland Balou (the second of the Charm of Lullabies cycle) has a harder and more mischievous edge, both in terms of the setting and its felicitous use of the original tongue.

My soul is dark! My heart is heavy! Take the lute
From the wall, it alone can I still bear to hear,
Draw from it with your skilled hands
Sounds that will beguile my heart.
If hope can still nourish my heart,
These sounds will charm it forth,
And if tears lurk in my dry eyes,
They will flow, and burn me no more!

But let the strain be wild and deep
And deprived of every joy!
I tell thee, minstrel, I must weep,
Or this heavy heart will be consumed!
For see! It has been been nursed by sorrow,
And ached for long in sleepless silence,
And now it is doomed to know the worst,
Let it break or let it be healed in song.

My soul is dark – Oh! quickly string
The harp I yet can brook to hear;
And let the gentle murmurs fling
Its melting murmurs o’er mine ear.
If in this heart a hope be dear,
That sound shall charm it forth again:
If in these eyes there lurk a tear,
‘Twill flow, and cease to burn my brain.

But bid the strain be wild and deep
Nor let thy notes of joy be first;
I tell thee minstrel, I must weep,
Or else this heavy heart will burst;
For it hath been by sorrow nursed,
And ached in sleepless silence long;
And now ‘tis doom to know the worst,
And break at once – or yield to song.

The original title of this poem is My Soul is Dark. It describes the imaginary words of King Saul who longs to be healed of his melancholy; he calls for the music of the youthful David, future king of Israel and supposed psalmist. Byron published the lyric in 1815 as the ninth of his Hebrew Melodies, a collection written in an attempt to emulate the success of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies of a few years earlier. To this end the composer English Jewish Isaac Nathan (1790-1864) approached Byron and asked him to provide the words for very old tunes that he claimed to have in his possession – the original melodies sung in the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, no less, before its destruction by the Romans. Byron duly provided Nathan with a succession of small literary masterpieces based on the Old Testament which soon became celebrated. These outlived the music (which was original in one sense, unoriginal in another) put together by Nathan in the hope of making a musical sensation. This interesting character is now venerated as a founding father of music in Australia, whither he fled to escape his English creditors.

The texts quickly became popular throughout Europe and were translated into various languages. The translation that Schumann used, perhaps out of loyalty to his father’s publishing house, or perhaps because he had known it since his youth, is titled Die Laute – ‘The Lute’. This is printed on page 15 of the Israelitische Gesänge section of the tiny volume titled Lord Byron’s Poesien – Erstes Bändchen, published in Zwickau ‘im Verlage der Gebrüder Schumann’ in 1821. (Schumann felt free to change a number of details of the poem at will, a liberty he allowed himself perhaps because this translation was ‘in house’ as it were.) August Schumann, the composer’s father and a scholar of English, contributed a translation of Byron’s Beppo to this series. Julius Körner was entrusted with much of the shorter poetry, but his work fails to achieve the power of the original.

This song is about the suppression of pent-up emotion; the singer seeks release in tears that can only be provoked by music. This plaint is sung by an anguished Saul and it is, in turn, a royal command for music of another kind that will bring forth the weeping that will assuage his pain. But as in Wolf’s Was für ein Lied (from Italienisches Liederbuch) this is a search for a song that can already be heard by the listener. The singer is so taken up with his plea for relief that he fails to notice that his prayers have already been answered by the music which he himself sings (in this case the tender, harp-accompanied middle section of Aus den ‘Hebräischen Gesängen’). The petition and its response are thus telescoped into a single song which occupies a central place in Myrten. It is undoubtedly the grandest number in the cycle, a halfway point in a work which celebrates the central role which music has played in the unfolding story of Robert and Clara. The composer has paid ample tribute to Clara throughout the cycle, but here he salutes his vocation the restorative powers of music itself: it is these which have enabled him to be tenacious enough to survive the long struggle to win her hand. This mighty song, touching and impassioned, is also the most perfect complement to the succession of more naïve folksongs which are its Myrten companions.

The tortured opening – waves of quavers which descend the stave in what may seem to be chromatic disarray, but which are cleverly fashioned to make an elaborate six-bar upbeat to the appearance of the singer – strikes an immediately exotic note. From the beginning we are aware that Schumann wishes to write a piece which consciously attempts to capture the Weltschmerz characteristic of Jewish music. He might well have visited a synagogue in Leipzig, a town with a famous cantorial tradition; it is difficult to believe that he evoked this tone without inside knowledge or aural reminiscences of some kind. The key is E minor, and the setting of the first words, ‘Mein Herz ist schwer’, conjoin with the piano writing at a V-I cadence which steers the music back to the home key after the extravagant excursions of the introduction. What follows is an accompanied recitative in the grand manner scarcely equalled in Schumann’s vocal music. This is not an outpouring of melody as such – the composer reserves this for the next section in the music – but these increasingly impassioned phrases contain all Saul’s imperious anguish. The idea of a harp has been established, if not from the very beginning of the song, then immediately following the word ‘Laute’ where the accompaniment broadens into more conventional arpeggio figurations where we can imagine a minstrel’s fingers brushing the strings.

The first four lines of the poem’s opening strophe are taken up with this extended recitative. After ‘das Herz betören’ a double bar-line ushers us into a change of key signature, and into the ‘aria’ section of the song. With the change into E major the piano announces a new melody of ineffable sweetness: the little finger of the right hand pricks out the outlines of a tune which will be taken up by the singer. This consists of an infinitely rueful succession of melting sequences – a soothing and peaceful cantilena which perfectly releases all the tensions generated by the song’s opening, whilst renouncing none of the pathos which is the keynote of the work as a whole.

After the first verse Schumann repeats the song’s introduction for the pianist; turbulence and anguish once again dominate as we return to the unsettled mood with which the song opened. This time the voice fails to materialise with words of any kind, let alone sentiments to match those of ‘Mein Herz ist schwer’. Instead there is a change of direction which suddenly steers the piano writing into the calm waters of C major, a key which is established by gently rippling quavers; these are the seraphically neutral background on which the voice re-imposes itself in the mood of the previous aria. This time the singer is required to dig deeper into the lower registers of his voice, but this is music fit to calm the most fevered breast, and it makes the same haunting impression as before.

For the passage beginning ‘Ja, Sänger, dass ich weinen muss’ (the third and fourth lines of the second strophe) the querulous recitative returns – this time in shorter form; this is marvellously dovetailed with the aria so that one mood seems to grow naturally out of the other in effortless combination. ‘Denn sieh! vom Kummer’ is a minor-key variation of the soothing music we have heard before. The melding of recitative and aria is a Schubertian speciality, and Schumann here proves himself that composer’s equal. The final section of the song unites its two aspects: the darkly neurotic recitative mood is revived for the song’s final moments, and the postlude is another reworking of the introduction. In the final bars the closing chords are in E major as if the singer’s troubled breast has at last proved susceptible to consolation. The final verdict is that there are grounds for hope: in the right performers’ hands music will soothe man’s manifold ills.

Heaven whispers it, Hell mutters it,
It resounds but faintly in the echo’s waves;
And when it comes to the sea, it falls silent,
On the heights you can hear its twofold hum.
It loves the thick of the battle, it flees peace,
It is granted to neither men nor women,
But to every animal, only you must dissect it.
It is not to be found in poetry,
Science has it, science above all,
And theology and philosophy.
It always presides amongst heroes,
Yet the weak never lack it in their souls,
It can be found in any house,
For were it missing, all would be over.
Small in Greece, on the banks of the Tiber
It grew bigger, but biggest of all in Germany.
It’s concealed in the shade, and the tiny flower,
You breathe it daily, it’s merely a… (what is it?).

’Twas in heaven pronounced – ‘twas muttered in hell,
And echo caught faintly the sound as it fell;
On the confines of earth ‘twas permitted to rest,
And the depths of the ocean its presence confessed
’Twill be found in the sphere, when ‘tis riven asunder,
Be seen in the lightning, and heard in the thunder;
’Twas allotted to man with his earliest breath,
Attends at his birth, and awaits him in death:
Presides o’er his happiness, honour and health,
Is the prop of his house and the end of his wealth.
In the heaps of the miser ‘tis hoarded with care,
But is sure to be lost on the prodigal heir.
It begins every hope, every wish it must bound,
With the husbandman toils and with monarchs is crowned,
Without it the soldier and seaman may roam
But woe to the wretch who expels it from home.
In the whispers of conscience its voice will be found,
Nor e’en in the whirlwind of passion is drown’d.
’Twill not soften the heart, and though deaf be the ear,
It will make it acutely and instantly hear.
Yet in shade let it rest like a delicate flower,
Ah breathe on it softly – it dies in an hour.

This cheery little riddle is just what we need after the emotional depths plumbed by the previous song. In this music Schumann confesses his lifelong passion for codes and ciphers, and he seems to be teasing a smile out of Clara; after all, this is a sample of how lively and communicative, how full of fun, their own lives would be after their marriage.

The literal translation given above can explain what the poem means line by line, but it can scarcely make sense unless one understands that it is the letter H embedded in the original German key-words which is the cause of all the word play. ‘H’ itself is also the answer to the puzzle. Catherine Fanshawe’s poem (which was wrongly attributed to Byron for some years) also plays on the letter H – but naturally the difference of vocabulary between English and German makes exact translation an all but impossible task. Kannegiesser’s translated version has only nine couplets; the original poem has eleven.

Schumann has something up his sleeve that few English poets would have understood. The letter H is the musical letter in German for the musical note B natural (for a German the letter B signifies B flat). Thus Schumann’s song is in B major (or H-Dur), where H is pronounced ‘Hah’. This is the perfect tonality after the preceding song in E minor, and (as the composer thought) a chance to contrast Byron’s darker side with his lighter.

The answer to the puzzle is blurted out in advance by the octave B naturals in semibreves with which the song opens. After this we have nothing less than an (almost) non-stop patter song which dances through the staves with twinkling glee. Four of the translator’s lines are needed for a statement of the pleasing little melody which makes up the A section of the song. At the fifth line mention of battle (‘Das Schlachtengewühl’) ensures that the music is coloured with quasi-military dotted rhythms. The translation is punctuated with a full stop after only three lines of poetry in this case, instead of four, and Schumann compensates for this by making this ‘B’ section of symmetrical length by repeating ‘Doch jeglichem Tier, nur musst du’s sezieren’ within a playful ritardando. The passage beginning ‘Nicht ist’s in der Poesie’ is a breezy repeat of the ‘A’ section, but this time the entry of the heroic figure which opens a return of ‘B’ (‘Bei den Helden führt es’) is preceded by a saucy little fanfare interlude of two bars which marches down the stave. This ‘B’ section terminates with another ritardando but without a verbal repeat. Then it is plain sailing to the end of the song with a reappearance of ‘A’: only the sight of the flower (at ‘im Blümchen auch’) occasions a moment of loving ornamentation, a glance of admiration made possible by a tiny ritardando and tender change of harmony.

It is now time for the answer to the riddle to be given. After ‘es ist nur ein …’ a dramatic diminished chord interrupts the musical flow as if to prevent this happening too soon. The additional words ‘was ist’s?’ are Schumann’s own, as is the ‘Adagio’ marking which is designed to suggest a cliffhanger. We are quickly let off the hook by a ‘Presto’ and hammered off-beat octave Bs in the piano which provide a last-minute clue to the answer in case we should need it. Fanshawe’s original does not provide a solution to the puzzle, and neither does Kannegiesser. His final phrase is ‘Es ist nur ein Hauch’ (to rhyme with the preceding ‘auch’), a word meaning ‘breath’. Schumann had originally intended to set this word for four-part chorus, a thoroughly impractical touch from the point of view of performance. Instead he left the note B (or H) bare on the stave without a word attached to it. This enables the singer to vocalise the note (or hum it). In this way the final line runs ‘It is only a …‘ followed by the sound of an ‘H’. This is a joke that can only be made in music and there is nothing else like it in the lieder repertoire. One of the disadvantages of a transposed performance of this song (lower voices sing it in A major) is that it makes nonsense of this dénouement. Most audiences, however, are none the wiser.

Row gently here, my gondolier, ply the water gently,
So that only she, to whom we glide, shall hear us coming!
Oh, if only heaven could speak and reveal all that it sees,
It would tell much about what the stars discern at night!

Now stay here, my gondolier, gently into the boat with your oar!
Gently, gently! While I climb the balcony, you keep watch beneath.
Oh, if we devoted ourselves to heaven as eagerly
As we seek favours of fair women, we could be angels!

In taking us to Venice, Schumann seems to make an abrupt change of locale. Yet he preserves a thread in the logic of the itinerary which acknowledges that Byron – whom the composer believed was the poet of Rätsel – was a close friend of Thomas Moore, and that Moore and Byron had spent time together in laddish mood in Venice. Carousing with his men friends was something that Schumann was prepared to relinquish in favour of a settled married life, and setting this poem may have been a means of saying farewell to bachelordom.

Moore’s words are remarkably laid back for a man who is indulging in a midnight assignation which involves shinning up a balcony to visit a married woman. Imprisonment or a duel could well be the result. (Casanova was famously imprisoned in Venice in 1755.) Here is the easy lilt of Irish laissez-faire, outrageously confident, and charming in its freely confessional tone. Freiligrath’s translation is a reasonably close one; but Schumann sets it in such a way that the scenario is rather less casual, and (perhaps unintentionally) more amusing: it introduces the character of the gondolier not merely as an obediently reliable cipher (as in Moore’s poem) but as someone potentially recalcitrant and unhelpful. With all these repeated remonstrances to his partner in crime ‘Gently, gently – softly, softly – put the oar in the boat, and be quiet about it! – the latter imprecation not in the original) it appears that Schumann would have been a much more nervous philanderer in the same circumstances.

We begin with music of languid sensuality. A dotted figuration in the left hand connected to an off-beat crotchet in the right is a marvellous evocation of an oar pulling through the dark waters and then surfacing in the treble stave, all in a single gliding movement; above this a ghost of a curvaceous Italian serenade is nonchalantly traced, as if the pianist, an invisible companion on this journey, were allowing the fingers of his right hand idly to skim the surface of the lagoon. The singer begins with a melody which descends the stave at ‘Leis’ rudern hier’ and ascends it again with what may be taken to be heart-stopping tenderness. There is a danger that this ardour will appear directed to the man – ‘Mein Gondolier’ – addressed in this phrase (as if A E Housman, perhaps, were serenading Andrea, his beloved Venetian who worked in the same line of business). In fact Moore’s use of ‘my’ displays the loftiness with which a gentleman might refer offhandedly to his valet as ‘my man’ without any trace of cosiness or affection.

Perhaps the composer believed that fond friendship is born of shared conspiracy; and yet Schumann also emphasises that it is this rower’s lack of stealth which is endangering the whole enterprise. Constant repeats of Leis’! Leis’! or ‘sacht’ (in neither original poem nor translation) make this gondolier seem typical of his notoriously independent trade, an antecedent of that insolent and sinister gondolier who rows Aschenbach across the lagoon in Death in Venice. If he should abandon his watch beneath the woman’s balcony the seducer would be stuck for an exit route. It is really important for the gondolier to ‘come on board’ as it were, and behind the elegant drift of this music are Schumann’s pleas, as if made through gritted teeth, that he should understand the dangers of the situation.

The rowing music gives way in each verse to a capricious little eight-bar scherzo (‘O, könnte, wie er schauen kann’ and later ‘O wollten halb so eifrig nur’) which is all the more charming for being addressed – if we were to imagine this scene being filmed – directly to camera. With as much cheek as charm, and with the twinkling eye which goes together with the shrugged shoulder, the poet admits to the life of a wastrel. The ‘if only’ aspect of this performance is indirectly addressed to the church, as if hoping that in begging our indulgence he will obtain indulgence of a plenary kind at the same time. In the second strophe the spring in this nimble music suggests a singer lightfooted enough to shin up the balcony railings without any trouble; in Moore’s poem the seducer does this as soon as he has finished his address, and without any further thought for ‘the staff’. But Schumann, that old fusspot, cannot resist looking over his shoulder and whispering ‘Sacht’ four times as if there really is a strong possibility that a noise from the gondolier will ruin the whole expedition. Singers sometimes allow themselves to end this song in a mood of dreamy reverie, as if all thought of mischief had been supplanted by the charm of sitting in the gondola and basking in the Venetian moonlight. Perhaps Schumann meant Florestan to be overpowered by Eusebius at this stage, but I doubt it: like the ditty which follows it, this should be an action song.

Mention of Ninetta’s mask has made Schumann think of carnival time in Venice, and the madcap gaiety and disorder of a party atmosphere. Accordingly he has written a song which is almost more Neapolitan than Venetian in its energy and gaiety. It is certainly more tarantella than barcarolle. The theme is elopement of course, and this would have appealed mightily to Schumann who considered running off with Clara when he was at his most desperate to be with her.

The little ritornello for piano which opens each verse (and also serves as a postlude) is a charming inspiration: fleet of foot, capricious, it is also deliciously feminine. The marking is ‘Munter, zart’. In this music we can here the rustle of petticoats and a peal of girlish laughter; I am always reminded of Coquette from this composer’s Carnaval as I play these dotted rhythms. The vocal melody is infectiously carefree, and the chords in alternating hands evoke the strum of an accompanying mandoline. The modulation to B minor in the middle of the verses (the song is strictly strophic and over in a trice) adds a brief note of suspense that suggests intrigue and danger. The final words ‘mein Leben, uns flieh’n!’ signal departure and are the perfect launch for the Nachspiel, a wave of intoxicated merriment which breaks into foam as it strikes the higher reaches of the treble stave and swiftly evaporates, Ninetta and her lover with it.

It is worth quoting the original poem which was published as one of Moore’s National Airs, with an accompanying musical arrangement. The German version of the poem shows what a very good translator Freiligrath was. He does not incorporate all the original details and nuances (a boatman’s costume – ‘ein Schifferkleid’ – is not necessarily that of a gondolier) but most of Moore’s imagery is included. In fact the Irish poet seems more affectionate with his ‘dearest’ Ninetta, and more concerned for her wellbeing and safety, than Freiligrath.

In this song Schumann seems to be saying that he is proud of his Clara who is a redoubtable fighter. Like many men he seems particularly bemused and delighted by belligerence when it assumes female form. On numerous occasions in his correspondence with his wife-to-be he says that he rejoices in having a ‘strong woman’ in his beloved. Clara was indeed strong (her later life was a testament to her indomitable qualities), and a great deal stronger than Schumann as it turned out. The result is one of the most forthright songs in the cycle, with one of the most dramatic postludes.

It seems a pity to point out that the tenor of this setting is a result of the translator’s misunderstanding of the poem published in 1790. In the original Burns poem the captain’s lady is a spoiled paragon of virtue who is persuaded to view the battle from safety, no doubt protected by a parasol, and with sufficient food and drink to sustain her during the joust taking place in the distance. In the old words to this air the captain’s lady even had ‘maids to wait upon her’. Once peace is declared she is ready to reward her victorious lover with every physical comfort. But Gerhard has her mounted in full armour ready to join the fray; she is a true helpmate in every sense, including that of the composer’s fantasy. The trouble is that Burns’s line ‘Thou shall sit in state’ (which does not refer to a saddle) is nowhere reflected in the German text. The implication of the translation is that if this wife sees her husband in battle it is from very close quarters, and that she is equally involved in the battle. It seems that translator and composer, transfixed by Ossianic myth, have been not been able to envisage a more genteel side to the modern Scottish warrior class.

The key is E minor, the marking is ‘Keck’ (‘bold’) and the opening bar is a tiny fanfare which is an unmistakable call to arms. Gerhard has erroneously taken Burns’s ‘O mount and go’ as an invocation to mount a battle charger, not the nag which will quietly take the captain’s wife out of harm’s way until the action is over. But it is clear that the composer is intoxicated by the more violent picture; in his mind Friedrich Wieck is the enemy, of course, and he must have longed to see Clara land a deadly blow on her father – something which she could never bring herself to do. A note of erotic abandon is struck with the idea of the two warriors exchanging a kiss, not in the ‘shades’ of Burns’s original (see below) but during the battle itself; in the translation the pair live in peace together after the war (that this is an inviting prospect is made clear by a change into the major key as soon as this is mooted) but the implication is that during hostilities they can be seen recklessly, and defiantly, to celebrate their union in mid-combat.

The music is a succession of trumpet motifs and aggressive little phrases which ascend the stave in dotted rhythms. The most important of these is a left-hand tune incorporating a falling chromatic motif in the deeper regions of the bass clef which struts as if it were a charger pawing the ground, impatient to gallop into battle. The rumbustious eight-bar postlude (a four-bar phrase mezzo forte, and then the same music forte) is based on an expanded version of this material.

A pair o’ gloves he bought to me,
And silken snoods he ga’e me twa;
And I will wear them for his sake,
The bonie lad that’s far awa’. –

O weary Winter soon will pass,
And Spring will cleed the birken shaw:
And my sweet babie will be born,
And he’ll be hame that’s far awa’. –

This is one of the most simple songs in the cycle, but in a skilled performance it can be surprisingly touching. Schumann has relied entirely on the power of a simple folksong-type melody to convey the pathos of the situation. The sadness of the story is more clear in the original Burns than in the translation. It is interesting that verse 3 of Burns was omitted by Schumann (where the girl is expelled from home in disgrace) although it exists in Gerhard’s German translation. Verse 5 on the other hand was omitted altogether in translation: it seems that this bowdlerisation (whereby the Germans were spared the direct information that the girl was pregnant) was considered desirable by the publishers. The song text is therefore a watered-down version, abbreviated and censored, of Burns’s powerful picture (in five strophes, not three) of a single mother-to-be.

This is the most autobiographical of all the Burns poems in Myrten. It relates to an episode in 1788 in which Burns returned to Ayrshire to find his erstwhile beloved Jean Armour driven from her home by her parents; she had re-established her liaison with the poet which had resulted in her pregnancy. She was in Burns’s words ‘banished like a martyr, forlorn, destitute and friendless’. He immediately set about arranging food and shelter for his Jean, and even bought her a mahogany bed. But there is a melancholic postlude to the story: twins were born to her but they died a few days after their birth.

This little plaint in A minor is marked ‘Ziemlich langsam’. The four-bar prelude is a remarkably effective evocation of a hopeful question followed by a negative answer. This juxtaposition of tension and release, like an intake of breath followed by a weary sigh, is an analogue for hopes raised, then dashed. We are made to hear an expectant glance which scans the horizon (the rising figure in the opening two bars, and the modulation to the relative major) and crestfallen disappointment when the lover is not visible (the falling melody and the return to the home key).

In this 6/8 composition Schumann has once again succeeded in suggesting the contours of Scottish folk melody in an original composition; this includes a dislocating 9/8 bar which breaks up a rhythmic sequence which might appear too pat for the hand-wringing subject. It also adds an asymmetrical touch to the declamation which seems ‘authentically’ folky (even if we have to remember that the constantly changing time signatures of Percy Grainger’s folksong arrangements were not known to Schumann). The vocal tessitura goes high up into the hills with the departing lover (note the demanding tessitura of ‘über die Berge’ in the first and third verses) but the divergence of voice and piano at this point is surely significant: on the word ‘Berge’ singer and pianist progress in contrary motion. We suspect that this girl’s young man has abandoned her. (If only every swain who took advantage of a woman’s trust had the affectionate nature of Robert Burns himself.) After a passionate, and heightened, restatement of the music of the prelude the postlude breaks up into teardrops – three bars of staccato quavers within a ritardando as if the girl has at last given up hope of her errant lover’s return. The last thing we hear is a tiny staccato chord in the left hand separated from its fellows by two quaver rests. This is surely the solitary tear – the ‘einsame Träne – referred to in the next song as Schumann has the male singer take up the theme.

For this poem Schumann strays outside the familiar reaches of the Lyrisches Intermezzo in the Buch der Lieder: Was will die einsame Träne? is taken from the section titled Die Heimkehr
(No XXVII page 204). This is the same group of poems from which Schubert had selected texts for his Schwanengesang in 1828.

It seems to me that Schumann in this point of the cycle has deliberately fashioned adjacent songs of abandonment and loss, one for the woman (Weit, weit) and the next for the man, both in matching 6/8 time. Both songs are marked ‘Ziemlich langsam’. The Burns song is in A minor, and this one in A major – although the constantly changing chromatic inflections of the music ensure that the Heine setting has a haunted minor-key feel to it. Such depictions of star-crossed lovers are part of the Myrten plan; they highlight, by contrast, the happiness of lovers like Robert and Clara who, like Tamino and Pamina, have passed through, and survived, all their tests and trials.

In contrast to the sheer aria which is Du bist wie eine Blume this is one of those pieces where Schumann abandons the idea of melody in favour of an arioso which follows the contours of speech. The melody at the song’s opening has a memorable lilt of course – it is by Schumann after all – but it is shaped primarily to suggest a mournful question, which it does perfectly. The singer is given time to continue this rhetorical enquiry with another observation – ‘sie trübt mir ja den Blick’. The first verse continues with another matched pair of world-weary sighs-in-music. The piano writing, in firm dotted crotchets, hugs the vocal line as if it were supporting someone grief-stricken and in need
of solace.

The poem’s second strophe springs into a different kind of life, graceful musical sequences which also give the impression of being melodic without being the real thing. It is here (where the music gathers pace) that one might imagine a link with the second verse of Allnächtlich im Traume from Dichterliebe, another song which is bedewed with the poet’s tears. This is the ‘B’ section of the song and Schumann decides on an ABBA shape. Accordingly the poem’s third verse more or less repeats the music for the second (with a slightly heightened climactic note where the more tortured ‘Qualen’ replaces ‘Freuden’). As if we were completing a musical palindrome the music of the opening returns for Heine’s concluding strophe; the cadence which leads the music into C sharp minor at the words ‘zerfloss wie eitel Hauch’ is particularly affecting.

The six-bar postlude is quietly eloquent, phrased in such a manner as to suggest that the singer, having decided that it is time for the tear to be banished, sets about making it disappear with some determination. There are four mini-cadences which fall into the home key of A major (either in root position or first inversion), each one indicative of a slow movement of arm or hand, as if the tear were being wiped on a sleeve or the back of a hand. This music falls in stages from the higher reaches of the keyboard to its centre, the final cadence dwelling for a full three beats on the dominant chord, as if every effort were being made to dry a face stained with tears before exposing it to the scrutiny of the tonic chord.

Despite all these efforts to finish the song (and to bring a chapter of grief in the singer’s life to a close) this is not in fact quite the end. Just as we reach the final resolution of A major, we hear a further A major chord, a staccato crotchet, which is like an after-shock and separate from what has gone before. It seems that the solitary tear remains to haunt the singer after all, and that there is no handkerchief in the world that can dry it.

I have a wife of my own,
And share her, forsooth, with nobody;
I’ll not be a cuckold
Or cuckold anyone either.
I have a purse of gold,
Thanks to nobody;
I have nothing to lend,
And I’ll borrow from nobody.

I am nobody’s lord,
And I’ll be nobody’s slave,
But my sword is sharp,
I fear nobody.
I’m a merry fellow,
Nobody gets me down;
If nobody cares about me,
I shall care about nobody.

I am naebody’s lord –
I’ll be a slave to naebody;
I ha’e a gude braid sword,
I’ll take dunts frae naebody –
I’ll be merry and free,
I’ll be sad for naebody;
Naebody cares for me
I care for naebody. –

This is one of Schumann’s least artful songs, a sheer jeu d’esprit which impresses us with its energy and incisiveness. If the composer had been aiming to make a portrait of Robert Burns himself only an aspect of the great poet is apparent here – the side that is full of the fighting spirit and which disrespects his so-called betters. Of Burns’s imaginative tenderness and his true humour there is no trace. The (admittedly distant) possibility that this song might have been intended to signify Friedrich Wieck has also been mooted in the introductory essay to Myrten for this booklet. The latter seems a possibility only because there is an element of stubborn determination, even cussedness, about the character depicted here, a relative of that Miller of Dee who ‘cares for nobody, no, not I, and nobody cares for me’. Even the protestations of humour and good spirits have a mirthless determination about them (‘Ein lust’ger Kauz bin ich’ is coloured in the minor key) which distance them from any genuine geniality. This music sparkles on paper; but despite the fact that there is all kind of merrymaking here – glee a-plenty, Schadenfreude perhaps, laughter of a gruff kind – there is no real smile, and little warmth in the way that the sinners of the world are despatched. There is simply not enough breath in this music, not enough room, for an expansive note to flourish amidst the driven credos of this bossy Scotsman who has his life organised down to the last widow’s mite. The clipped rhythms of the piano writing are foursquare and allow no deviation from the rules; so there is relish, certainly, but how much love? Some might say that Schumann has cottoned on to an aspect of the unforgiving Presbyterianism of the time.

The song is very simple and completely strophic. The two-bar introduction announces the melody with which the singer begins and the accompaniment hugs it throughout, a feature which, in this case, reinforces the shipshape control the singer exerts over his entire existence. The interlude between the two verses also serves as the postlude. With its prancing left-hand chords and grim determination this is among the trickiest of Schumann postludes. In style and writing the Nachspiel of one other Schumann song comes to mind – Verratene Liebe Op 40 No 5. This common thread links this music to the idea of dancing in the streets, as well as the idea of gossip spreading like wildfire. The piano writing of Niemand is usually taken to signify the singer’s elation; but it is also possible that it represents the tittering of those who are highly amused by the eccentric antics of the village misanthrope. If there is hilarity in this music it might well be the laughter of derision; if this were the case we would imagine that the second verse is sung in defiance of the public amusement generated by the first.

Burns’s original poem (which appeared in 1788) has a quiet dignity about it which is captured neither in the German translation, nor Schumann’s setting.

A single-paged folksong this, but a jewel it can prove to be in the right hands. It has a soulful, heartfelt seriousness which makes it perhaps the most authentic of all Schumann’s evocations of Scottish music – and it is also perhaps nearest to the melodies which Burns so scrupulously collected from all over Scotland. By writing the song in the same key as Niemand (F major) the composer has consciously linked it with its predecessor. If Weit, weit (No 20) and Was will die einsame Träne? (No 21) were male and female pictures of the abandoned lover, here we have contrasting male and female versions of respectability (or lack of it) – the pillar of rectitude that is the smug paragon of Niemand, and the vulnerable unmarried mother of Im Westen. This song, like Jemand, also has Jacobite connotations.

There is something extremely touching, and melancholy, about the alla breve swing to the melody (in 6/4); this seems to survey the horizon as it scans all directions of the compass for the lover who has abandoned his girl (and his baby – as we later discover). The phrasing and the spacious shaping of the melody add to the sense of the young mother’s wide field of vision – infinitely expectant, yet always doomed to disappointment. The accompaniment to the first verse of the song is as simple as that for a hymn tune, but Schumann endows this song with a dignity and emotional depth that are out of all proportion to the musical means. There is something stoically grand about this tableau, as if this picture of abandoned love were meant to be photographed by a great film director against a background of appropriately craggy and dramatic Scottish scenery. The words suggest that the lover (and father) may be as far away as Ireland, or even America.

At ‘Aus Westen winkt, wo die Sonne sinkt’ there is a change of tempo and mood (the music is marked ‘Lebhafter’) which represents a lifting of spirits and quickening of the heartbeat. The piano writing blossoms into waving fronds of quaver arpeggios which seem to suggest arms stretched out in hope of clasping succour from the returning prodigal. Thus the hymn tune of the opening is replaced by the ghost of a waltz; it is as if the memory of the good looks and the charm of her faithless lover have suddenly animated the girl’s bleak existence and given her unreasonable grounds for hope. We immediately realise that her expectations are doomed, and for this reason this delicately fragrant music seems all the more poignant. The final cadential phrase (which divulges the crucial information about the existence of a dependent child with the words ‘mein Kindlein’) seems a shy and embarrassed footnote to a story which is already sad enough without this last-minute revelation.

At this stage of the cycle a critic might have accused Myrten of deteriorating, after a good start, into a succession of folkish fragments of diminishing musical import. This is why it was important that the composer placed this song, an immortal masterpiece, and the equivalent of heavy artillery in lieder terms, in just this position in the sequence. If we were in any danger of forgetting that Schumann was a great composer of the German lied, Du bist wie eine Blume arrives just in time to remind us that the English and Scottish flavours to the cycle are decorative sidelines, however deeply felt. To close the pages of Myrten there are three settings of German poetry; and the poetry of Heine at this level is greater than most.

The poem is No XLVII from Die Heimkehr: thus only one (Die Lotosblume) of the three Heine settings in Myrten comes from the Lyrisches Intermezzo which inspired Dichterliebe. Eric Sams calls this poem ‘perhaps the most immediately appealing ever written’. This may exaggerate its status in literary terms, but it has certainly inspired many composers – the poem is the perfect length to allow its verbal images to flower into musical lyricism, while the shy and epigrammatic nature of the verse discourages the pianistic overgrowth that might crush its slender stem.

The best settings of this poem are thus the simple ones, and Schumann, with a hit tune up his sleeve, opts for one of his ‘arias’. There is a symmetry between this song of a German flower as the cycle nears its end – a return to home ground as it were – and the exotic Indian lotus flower earlier in the work which signified curiosity for the outside world, and impatience for the honeymoon. Both songs have been gratefully hummed through the ages (by singers and non-singers alike) because of their melodies. It surely does not matter if it seems that this glorious cantilena had been thought of first, and the words then made to fit it: as it turns out the marriage between music and text is not merely a marriage of convenience.

On a throbbing bed of semiquavers, initially in a neutral A flat major, the bel canto melody (with touches of fioritura – what else in a song with this title?) slowly unfurls like the unfolding of scented blossom on a summer day. The music has the stately pace of prayer, but it is also tremulous with sublimated eroticism. We have seen elsewhere – in Widmung for example – that music poised between these two poles is something of a Schumannian speciality. Within seconds we have moved to the tender pathos of B flat minor for ‘eine Blume’, and we can see in this progression the expression on the lover’s face – as if a gardener full of the most tender concern for the fragility of his blossoms. For the reassurance and purity of ‘rein’ we return to an unsullied clearing in E flat major; anxious solicitude reasserts itself, and the diminished chord on ‘Wehmut’ adds a note of real melancholy. It does not matter that the prosody is victim of the melody, and that the noun ‘Wehmut’ should be, ideally, nearer to its verb ‘schleicht’; masters of mezzo voce have always succeeded in singing the next phrase (the heady ‘schleicht mir ins Herz hinein’) with magical inflection. These words, in this tessitura, and when beautifully sung, really do seem to evaporate into the ether and, in so doing, insinuate themselves into the secret places of the heart. The subtle rise of the accompanying harmony at this point adds to the impression of music and emotion teetering on tremulous tiptoe.

Without further ado the poem’s second verse is launched: this begins as a repeat of the first in term of the vocal line. The piano writing, much of it an octave higher than before, has become fuller and more rapturous. Subtle changes in the bass line (the stronger progression at ‘ob ich die Hände’) lend greater determination to the voice: it is as if the singer, like the flower, is also reaching for the sunlight. Blessing the lover’s head (from Heine’s side the Jewish aspect of this laying-on of hands is clear) engenders physical frisson as much as religious awe. The poet, too, is a specialist in the mixture of sex and religion, and the music waxes even more lyrical when warmed by this physical contact. Schumann then makes room for the prayer (‘betend, dass Gott dich erhalte’) which halts the flow of piano semiquavers and is accompanied by two crotchets, as if such spacious chords were more appropriate in a church or synagogue. It is also as if the composer were allowing a great Italian singer a cadenza at an important cadential point in an aria. In right-hand octaves the piano echoes, and even heightens, the melody of this blessing; then voice and piano conjoin in a resignatory sigh, as if saying ‘Let God’s will be done’ at the same time as ‘so rein und schön und hold’ or ‘isn’t she beautiful?’ (There is often this mixture of sacred and profane when these two creators work in tandem.) Singer and accompanist sink gracefully to their final shared cadence.

The piano now has a four-bar postlude – one of the composer’s most telling. Here a melody – the responsibility of the singing fifth finger of the accompanist’s hand – is superimposed on the throbbing semiquavers. This moves, almost crab-like, up the stave, as if scarcely daring to look beauty in the face whilst blinded by its radiance. Careful listening to this passage will reveal sonic snapshots of a number of expressions on the composer’s face – concern, rapture, happiness, tenderness, unease – and these change with each harmonic progression. As the piano eventually reaches the home key of A flat major after much subtle ado, we imagine that he might allow himself a tender embrace with his Clara, as if a dream were at last crowned with physical reality. In contrast to all the songs of separation that we have heard throughout the cycle Clara actually seems to be there as he sings to her (how else can we account for the intimacy of that initial ‘Du’?). That the bride-to-be seems to be in the composer’s arms at last is proof, if any were needed, that the cycle is drawing to its close.

I send a greeting like the scent of roses,
I send it to a rose-like face.
I send a greeting like spring’s caressing,
I send it to eyes that brim with spring’s light.
From anguished storms that rage through my heart
I send a breath – may it cause you no harm!
When you think of me in my sadness,
The sky of my nights will then be made bright.

Rückert’s Östliche Rosen was published in 1822 in a handsome edition by Brockhaus of Leipzig. Schubert discovered the book in the year of its publication and took to its poet, hitherto unknown to him, with almost unprecedented enthusiasm. In this volume he found his entire Rückert œuvre: Du bist die Ruh’, Lachen und Weinen, Greisengesang, Sei mir gegrüsst and Dass sie hier gewesen. Of these it is the final song which has the most in common with the work recorded here – Rückert was perhaps the most fragrance-obsessed of all poets, and both Dass sie hier gewesen and Aus den östlichen Rosen are centred on scent.

There are no headings to Rückert’s poems, so Schubert himself added the titles – sometimes taking crucial lines from the poem or, in the case of Greisengesang, inventing a new one. Schumann’s selected poem, ‘Ich sende einen Grüss wie Duft der Rosen’, nestles between those selected by Schubert; the younger composer must have turned these pages on tiptoe, as it were, for that very reason – all of Schubert’s Rückert settings had been published in the composer’s lifetime and Schumann certainly knew them. The younger composer’s title ‘From the ‘Eastern Roses’ (meaning ‘from Rückert’s collection of that title’) has sometimes been the source of misunderstanding: there is no overtly oriental intention in these words beyond the fact that the collection as a whole is dedicated to the poet of the West-östlicher Divan, and that some of the poems owe a great deal to the spirit of Goethe’s anthology. I would also like to think that this song, with its indirect link to Schubert, was another of those covert tributes to his great predecessor that Schumann made in Myrten.

The manuscript of the poem has the words ‘In Erwartung Claras’ (‘Awaiting Clara’) scribbled in its margin: as he composed this lied Schumann imagined himself speaking to her, as if it were a love letter in music. The poem comes from the lips of a male poet and, in performances of Myrten which are shared (as they must be) between a male and a female singer, ascribing it to the tenor seems the obvious thing to do. But Du bist wie eine Blume is also a man’s song, and so is the final song of the cycle. To maintain her place in the dialogue, Aus den östlichen Rosen is sung here by the soprano: after all, poem and music can easily be interpreted as something read aloud – or sung – by their enchanted dedicatee and recipient, a Rückert successor to Suleika. This music has a lighter, shyer and more perfumed quality than Lied der Suleika (No IX), and it seems happily associated with the female voice.

Du bist wie eine Blume has the velvety depth of a magic carpet: the luxurious density of its pile, each bar of music closely woven, brings to mind an oriental rug of great opulence. By contrast Aus den östlichen Rosen is created of diaphanous material – moiré silk dappled by spring sunlight, and rippling gently in the breeze. The cycle’s final song, Zum Schluss, is also dense and concentrated in its way: thus the composer varies the sequence with changes of texture, as well as tonality. The close-packed semiquaver accompaniment of Du bist wie eine Blume yields to piano writing that is suddenly airy and light. Left-hand quavers initiate gruppetti of delicate right-hand semiquavers phrased in threes. Semiquaver rests in both hands make the writing seem even more transparent. On these rippling eddies of sound are superimposed fragments of piano melody, echoes of the vocal line like so many tender sighs. One such is after the word ‘Rosenangesicht’ where the accompaniment’s response to the beauty of that rose-like face represents a tiny pang of longing.

The vocal line itself is memorable without boasting a tune as grand as its predecessor’s. It begins diffidently on a succession of B flats which gently edge upwards, first a rise of a tone on ‘einen Gruss’, another on ‘Duft’, and then a shy little cadence in the supertonic minor on ‘Rosen’ (echoed by the piano). These scented greetings are part of a courtly love tradition and they betoken a gentleness where intimacy with a lover engenders more respect, rather than less. This writing suggests contained passion – a conversation between two shy lovers (represented here by voice and piano) where each is hesitant to press their case for fear of being inconsiderate to the wishes of the other.

The song’s middle section begins at the poem’s fifth line. The words ‘Schmerzensstürmen, die mein Herz durchtosen’ bring a storm-cloud over the horizon. The music moves into C minor and there is a turbulence to this passage which is soothed by the cadence in B flat major (on ‘dich unsanft rühr’ er nicht’). There is a slightly forced aspect to this tonal shift which accurately reflects the poet’s determination not to disturb his lover with his own depressions – the music is made to return to a calmer tonality. The three bars of interlude following this are marked with a crescendo, as if the stormy weather were about to reassert itself, but at ‘wenn du gedenkest’ the re-entry of the voice pours oil on troubled waters with a ‘subito piano’. The word ‘Freudelosen’ reveals the misery of the suitor, and ‘Nächte licht’ descends the stave – the song’s lowest point in terms of tessitura. But help is at hand: the piano writing suddenly stretches up into the higher reaches as if a newly opened window has allowed a shaft of spring sunlight to shine on the singer. These contrasting thoughts entwine in voice and piano, and the optimistic and pessimist strands of the song are reconciled at the lingering cadence. The postlude recycles the spring-sunshine motif heard in the piano four bars earlier, this time an octave lower: illumination has been replaced by the calmer glow of enlightenment. The final piano flourish – a teasing little right-hand triplet in E flat major which rises as the left-hand arpeggio falls – is like rose-petals, and their scent, scattered in the breeze.

Here in these earth-stifled
Breezes, where sadness dissolves like dew,
I’ve fashioned you that imperfect
Garland, sister, bride!
When we are received above
And God’s sun looks upon us,
Love shall fashion for us the perfect
Garland, sister, bride!

The poem appears as the final item of the Erster Strauss (or ‘First Bouquet’) of that gigantic set of poems Liebesfrühling – the source of the majority of Schumann’s Rückert settings. (Volume 4 of the Hyperion Schumann Edition centres on the Zwölf Gedichte aus F. Rückert’s Liebesfrühling, Op 37.) Zum Schluss – the composer’s title, not the poet’s – is No XLVI in a five-part sequence that consists of nearly four hundred poems of different lengths and metrical forms. Schumann used one of the three editions of the enormously successful Gesammelte Gedichte that appeared between 1834 and 1836. As we shall see, he later acquired the more complete edition of 1843 which served him for his Rückert settings of 1849.

This text was ideal for Myrten of course; it might have been conceived by Rückert for this very purpose, except that it was written long before, in 1821: mention of the poet’s wreath of poems in celebration of marriage is wonderfully apt for Schumann’s myrtle-wreath-in-music for Clara. In summing up their achievement the creators (here twinned in word and musical deed) modestly acknowledge the shortcomings of their bridal gift. The poet assures the ‘sister, bride’ (a conjunction which encompasses friend, relative, helpmate, partner, lover – the chastity of family devotion superimposed on connubial bliss) that God will bestow greater perfection on the couple in the fullness of time.

Schumann was not given to religious perorations, but there was something about his love for Clara which seemed to him sacred and awe-inspiring. He had no qualms about incorporating Ave Maria into the postlude of Widmung, and here, in the same key of A flat major, he unashamedly imagines the completion of the circle where the prayer which concludes the first song in the cycle has been answered with transfigured bliss. In fact the couple’s apotheosis (as far as the public was concerned) was not long in coming: Robert and Clara were soon to become celebrated figures in German music, and the story of their struggles and triumph against parental adversity the stuff of which legends are made.

The marking is ‘Adagio’ in 4/4. The only other song in the cycle remotely like it is Lied der Braut No 2. There the melody, at first merely a murmured monotone, becomes suspended in time as the daughter stands enfolded in her mother’s arms, asking for permission to embrace her husband-to-be (‘Lass mich ihm am Busen hangen’). Here there is a similar sense of time standing still as Schumann solemnly plights his troth: this is as near as we will ever get to hearing marriage vows set to music. The music suggests the solemnity of a hymn or a slow processional, and we notice the melodic shape of ‘Ave Maria’ built into bars 3 and 4 (‘wo die Wehmut taut’). At the poem’s fifth line the accompanying chords – no longer ‘mezzo staccato’ and fuller in texture– are supported by bass octaves as if the organist has added his pedals as a footnote to the ceremony. The solemnity of the cadence which concludes ‘Gottes Sonn’ entgegenschaut’ (supported by suitably ecclesiastical minim chords with a ritardando) suggests the arrival of the celebrants at the altar. Here we find ourselves in the solemn key of B flat minor.

At this point all ceremony suddenly recedes; the lover and his bride seem caught in a shaft of musical sunlight which picks them out from all the others in the congregation, and from all other lovers. With the minimum of movement from the pianist’s hands (a few notes changed within the chord) B flat minor miraculously melts into an inversion of E flat 7 on a B flat bass – the threshold over which we must cross to return to the home key of A flat major. At the same time, at ‘wird die Liebe’, the tenor voice caresses the stave in notes soft and high, and we can almost see the physical caress – infinitely tender, and still awestruck – which accompanies his melody. No film director could have engineered a more perfect final close-up of the two stars of Myrten. The four-bar postlude is an echo of the singer’s preceding four bars; mutual devotion, rapt and wordless, is turned into sound. Before fading from the screen and into immortality, two faces scan each other with that mixture of ardour and almost reverential tenderness that has been the keynote of the entire cycle.